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ALEXANDER PROCTKR. 



THE WITNESS OF JESUS 



AND OTHER SERMONS 



ALEXANDER PROCTER 



WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY T. P. HALEY 



Edited by J* H: r GARRISON 



Being dead he yet speaketh. 



ST. LOUIS 

CHRISTIAN PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1901 



THE LIBRARY OF 


CONGRESS, 


Two Co^its 


R ECEIVED 


SEP. 20 


1901 


COPVRIQHT ENTRY 

CLASS 3x XXc. Nu. 


COPY 


B. 



,■*■*» 






^ 



Copyrighted, 1901, by 
CHRISTIAN PUBLISHING COMPANY. 



I 



PREFACE. 

The noblest and most enduring record which 
any man can leave behind him, when he has 
finished his earthly labors, is the influence 
which his life has made on other lives, which, 
transmitted from one generation to another, be- 
comes a perpetual force for good while the 
world stands. While such a record is not 
traceable for human eyes in all its wide and 
subtle ramifications, it is none the less real and 
potent. A consecrated personality is the 
mightiest force for the uplifting of humanity 
which this world has ever known or can know. 
A good man is God's best gift to the world. 
Such a man cannot live and labor and suffer 
and die without putting into active operation 
good influences which, embodied in other lives, 
become permanent factors working for the 
world's redemption. 

It has often, however, been a matter of re- 
gret among his brethren and friends that 
Alexander Procter did not, during his active 
life, put into more enduring form those ideas 
and truths which, as preached by him, so pro- 
foundly affected those who heard them. That 
he did not write more is, no doubt, a matter to 



4 Preface 

be deeply regretted. But let no one suppose 
that because of this fact the good influence of 
his life will end with the generation which 
knew and heard him. Hundreds and thousands 
of minds have been deeply impressed and 
largely molded by his thought and his char- 
acter, and through these he will continue to 
influence the thought and lives of men far be- 
yond the limits, in time or space, of his name 
and fame. 

It was the feeling referred to above, however, 
that led some of his friends to secure his con- 
sent to preach a series of discourses which 
should be taken down by a stenographer, and 
afterwards revised and printed in a book. 
The sermons were preached and taken down, 
as had been planned, in the latter part of 1892 
and the first part of 1893, but unfortunately 
they were never revised by their author. He 
was in feeble health, and he had a strong dis- 
inclination to the use of a pen. It is not a 
matter of wonder that the stenographer often 
failed to catch the great preacher's exact 
thought, in writing out the sermons from the 
word-symbols in his reports. It is known, too, 
by Bro. Procter's best friends that, while he 
was capable of expressing himself in a very 
vigorous and striking way, he was careless of 



^M/' 



Preface 5 

literary form, and never spoke with the 
thought of a reporter before his eyes. These 
two facts have placed a very heavy and often 
embarrassing responsibility upon the redactor, 
into whose hands these manuscripts were 
placed to be put in condition for publication. 
Sometimes the preacher was made to say ex- 
actly the opposite of what he did say or in- 
tended to say, a fact made obvious by the con- 
text. Occasionally the editor or redactor was 
not able to make out from the stenographer's 
report what the speaker meant, and when a 
sentence or paragraph was unintelligible to 
him, he struck it out. Where the meaning 
was plain but the statement was marred by in- 
felicity of expression, owing to the rush of 
extemporaneous utterance or fault of the re- 
porter, we have not hesitated to change the 
form of expression; but the aim throughout 
has been to preserve the exact language of the 
author, when this was possible. 

It will be sufficiently obvious, from these 
statements, that these sermons should not be 
judged by a strict literary standard. It should 
be remembered constantly that they are not 
written but spoken sermons, and we have 
thought it best to retain the free, unconstrained 
form which marked the author's extemporan- 



6 Preface 

eous style of preaching. They are, at best, 
only an approximate report of the sermons as 
they were actually preached. But our familiar- 
ity with the author's thought and style en- 
ables us to say, with confidence, that we have 
set forth in these sermons the characteristic 
ideas of the great preacher whom his friends 
were wont to speak of as "the Sage of Inde- 
pendence. " In this fact lies the sole claim of 
the book on the brotherhood which he loved so 
well and which he served so long and so faith- 
fully and which can never cease to bear the 
impress of his thoughts. To the question 
which the younger people of this generation, 
and the thoughtful people of coming genera- 
tions, may ask, What were the leading ideas 
and mental characteristics of Alexander 
Procter which gave him the reputation and 
high rank he holds among preachers? this vol- 
ume of sermons must forever remain the best 
answer that can be given. 

Standing in relations of closest personal 
friendship with the author of these sermons, as 
the editor of this volume did, their preparation 
for the press, at the request of his family, diffi- 
cult and delicate as the task has been, was a 
labor of love. We are profoundly grateful that 
he has left us so much of his thou eh t to be 



Preface 7 

placed in this permanent form as a legacy to 
his brethren and to those who shall come after 
him, and as an enduring contribution to the 
cause of religious reformation with which he 
was so long and so prominently identified. 
That these sermons may help, in some degree, 
to hasten the realization of those splendid 
ideals of Christian faith and life, herein pre- 
sented, is alike the aim of the author and the 
earnest prayer of the editor. 

J. H. Garrison. 
St. Louis, Sept. 6, 1901. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. The Witness of Jesus . . n 

II. The Creation — Old and New 29 

III. The Coming One ... 47 

IV. The Transfiguration of Man 70 
V. Foreknowledge and Predes- 
tination .... 80 

VI. Salvation and Retribution 103 
VII. The Three Worlds of Reve- 
lation . . . . .119 
VIII. The IyAw of Retribution . 138 
IX. Following Jesus . . . 161 
X. Knowledge of God — Its 

Source and Limitation . 183 
XI. The New Birth — Heavenly 

Things . . . -197 

XII. Authority in Religion . • .215 

XIII. The Coming of the Perfect 235 

XIV. The Unseen Things . .255 

XV. The Law of Glorification . 275 

XVI. The Creed of the Church . 293 
9 



io Contents 

XVII. The Baptismal Formula —Its 

Significance . . .312 
XVIII. Christian Baptism — Its Mean- 
ing 329 

XIX. Ground of Faith in a Future 

Life 353 

Biographical Sketch . . . -373 
A Memorial Address . . . -375 



I 

THE WITNESS OF JESUS 

To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come 
into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. — 
John 18:37. 

The subject this morning is The Witness of 
Jesus. In answer to Pilate's inquiry if he 
were a king, Jesus said: "To this end was I 
born, and for this cause came I into the world, 
that I might bear witness to the truth. " The 
spectacle that has excited, kept up and in- 
creased the wonder of the ages is that Form, 
that Life, standing back there, bearing its bur- 
den alone in behalf of what to Him was truth. 
If we are to bring before our imagination a 
clear, correct picture of all the religions of civ- 
ilization from the time of that life, we must 
seek to understand the saying: "I am the 
Word that came from heaven to bear witness to 
the truth." If we would approximate, not fully 
realize, that position that is made here a cen- 
tral light — the central interest of all these 
centuries that have passed away since, — it is 
necessary for us to ask two or three questions. 

What is the witness for? If we think of the 
exigencies in the lives and the affairs of men, 
we ask, should there be any witness? All the 
usage and the language of the New Testament 



12 The Witness of Jesus 

is taken from our own experience, so we might 
understand it. A witness is needed for some- 
thing that is unproved, and needs to be proved. 
We do not call a witness in court when the 
case is all well known, and a witness is unnec- 
essary when there is only one side to a question. 
We call a witness when there are interests at 
stake; when there is danger of something being 
lost by the want of testimony; when something 
needs to be proved. Now let us keep in our 
minds the usage of that word in our earthly af- 
fairs and interests, and then look at this Wit- 
ness, and ask, what, in his estimation, is needed 
to be established. He came to bear witness for 
something, that it might be proved; that it 
might be established. 

Now we can nearly always better understand 
what a thing is, by showing, in the first place, 
what it is not. And there is a vast amount of 
truth connected with the lives of men, that he 
did not come to bear testimony to at all. The 
saddest part of the great history of the Church 
has been, its efforts to apply his witness to 
things to which it has no reference what- 
ever, — the truths that men discovered them- 
selves. It was not intended that any witness 
should come to prove these. You can trace 
these efforts through all the thousand years of 
Christian history, almost up to our own time. 
The theory has been that Jesus came that he 



The Witness of Jesus 13 

might testify to all truth. That is the reason 
why the truths of astronomy, botany, and geol- 
ogy and all the other sciences have been made 
subject to the words of the Bible. The saddest 
part of the history of the Church — that part of 
it which brings to an intelligent Christian man 
the saddest feeling he has in his heart — has 
been the attempt to make the Bible and the 
religion of Jesus responsible for the science of 
the world. It is a sad fact, furthermore, and it 
need not be denied, but ought to be looked 
calmly, squarely in the face, that there has 
been no great discovery made in the truths of 
this world, there has been no great science 
brought to light, necessary to the life or com- 
fort of men, that the Church has not opposed 
and fought with all its might when it came. 
And they continue to do this to this hour; 
and, in spite of all the sad lessons of the past, 
they do it yet. They staked the truth of the 
Bible against astronomy; they staked the truth 
of the Bible and the whole conception of the 
six days' creation against geology; they staked 
the truth of the Bible against the conception of 
the circulation of the blood — that great idea of 
physiology; they now stake the truth of the 
Bible in behalf of those old conceptions that 
have died, and are leaving us, and against the 
new conceptions which are coming in. This 



14 The Witness of Jesus 

is the sad part of it; this it seems so hard for 
us to learn. 

Now, Jesus did not come to bear any testi- 
mony to the laws that have proceeded from the 
creation. It was not his business to do that. 
All you have to do in a single effort is to see 
that the civilization, that the progress, that the 
advance of mankind, has been made by the 
efforts of the intellect in making these discov- 
eries. God has his witnesses everywhere. Sir 
Isaac Newton was a witness, sent to bear testi- 
mony to the great question of gravitation; 
Herschel in his time was a witness for the 
movement of the stars; Galileo, the first who 
was willing to suffer for it; Hugh Miller and 
Lyell were witnesses, adequate to testify to the 
truths of geology; and so in all departments of 
science. It was not necessary that there should 
be any witnesses to these, further than those 
they already have. 

But there are, behind all these discoveries, a 
few great questions about which there was un- 
certainty in the human heart — questions in re- 
gard to man that science cannot answer. 
Science cannot answer the question, ''Whence 
came we?" Science cannot answer the ques- 
tion, "Why is man here in the world, and 
whither is he going?" Astronomy, geology 
and botany, and all the sciences that teach us 
the wonders of nature, say nothing of the need 



The Witness of Jesus 15 

of suffering and atonement. We listen to the 
great facts of the coming of all living things, 
of the passing away of generation after genera- 
tion, but beyond that we know very little. To 
a man endowed with light they do not answer 
these great questions that have borne on the 
human heart with so much weight during the 
ages, and which have been extorted from the 
soul by its condition here in the world. If you 
tell me that God is my Father, I will say that I 
am a father, that you are a father, and we know 
that fathers love their children. Fathers want 
their children to be happy. Fathers will do 
anything in their power to prevent suffering. 
Fathers are willing, if they are kind and unself- 
ish, to spend their whole resources for the well- 
being and happiness of their children. You 
tell me, God, the Author of this whole frame of 
thought, is my Father; and then I want to know 
why it is that I came into this world weeping. 
I want to know why he placed me in a world 
where there is as much evil as good; where 
there is darkness as well as light; where there 
is pain as well as pleasure; where there is death 
as well as life. And when I come into this 
world I have to share equally in them all. Will 
my Father send his children here and place 
them in a position contrary to the law of their 
being, where there is no possibility of living 



16 The Witness of Jesus 

without taking just as much of the evil as of 
the good? 

That question was discussed in the ancient 
days. Men said, "Why does a man live at all? 
Why has God put him in this position and 
hedged up his way in darkness ?" And men say, 
when they read the psalms of David, when the 
heart breaks as they look at these conditions 
around them, "Why has God made all men in 
vain?" The heart of the Israelite that looks 
on the history of his people, — Abraham, Isaac 
and Jacob, — the protection, the leadership and 
the blessing — blessing for them and for all 
the world, out of the midst of his captivity, 
broken, scattered, and crushed; temple of wor- 
ship, priest and people all gone, says, "God has 
made all men in vain;" and turning his break- 
ing heart he says, "Remember how short my 
time is; what man is he that liveth and shall 
not see death? what soul has power to save 
itself from the hand of the enemy?" 

These are questions that life has extorted 
from the human heart in every age of the 
world, and does it yet. A witness is desired 
here — somebody that can testify on the ques- 
tion; and in the fulness of time the Witness 
came: and when he came, he came to testify on 
this question. 

Now, I have time just to glance a little at 
the outline of this vast theme that comes to us. 



The Witness of Jesus 17 

This Nazarene stands before us, and he tells us, 
"To this end was I born" of a mother like 
yours; "for this reason came I into the world, 
that I might bear testimony to the truth;" and 
this he answered to the question, "Are you 
king?" The first thing he tells us is, "God is 
your Father." If you run back along the line 
of your human genealogy you will go just to 
the first man, Adam, son of God. There is a 
side of man's nature that comes with the ani- 
mal; and there is a side of his nature that comes 
from God. Man was a son of God. 

But the first fact to which Christ testified is 
simply the incarnation. He does not stand 
and testify in words, as the professional wit- 
ness in court; he comes to live out his testi- 
mony before the angels of God and men. Let 
us see it. In this vast subject of God's relation 
to us and our relation to Him, if our destiny is 
to be determined, it wants more than words, 
more than the utterances of the lips, to write 
that testimony on the thoughts and on the 
heart, on the scroll of the world, to be there 
forever, and in answer to the question, If 
that be true, if God is ray Father, why came I 
into this kind of a world? I take but a step, a 
first, second or third, and something is pulling 
me the wrong way; and I want to yield to it. 
My heart tells me, all is right. Both sides are 

before me. And this we have had before, over 
2 



18 The Witness of Jesus 

and over again. That kind of a world God has 
placed us in; just between these influences, to 
be turned one way or the other. And if that 
which is the nearest to me, that which is the 
most beautiful, that which attracts, that comes 
with softness and sweetness from the breath of 
life, from the morning in which we lived, to 
boyhood, to youth, beckoning to scenes of 
sin, mysteriously comes into my heart, like a 
serpent that begins to sting me , and I feel it 
wrong — how is that? God is my Father. We 
read the testimony a little way; he says, "Here 
is my testimony in regard to it, not merely in 
words, but I will show you the meaning of it." 
And as soon as he came from Galilee to Jordan, 
as soon as the voice came down from above, 
u You are the Son of God," he showed us the 
meaning. That voice was necessary to make 
the Bible what it is. A man cannot start out 
in the world without having that question, 
where he is from, settled first. And Jesus now 
is to make the career of a man for all men, 
just as he himself is. It is necessary that a 
voice should speak out of the heavens, out of 
the mouth of God, "This is my beloved Son." 
And as soon as he comes out of Jordan, the 
next question comes up about suffering and 
temptation and sorrow. And a voice says, 
"Come with me to the wilderness and I will 
explain them." He goes to the wilderness 



The Witness of Jesus 19 

and sees these two sides of life. Both are pre- 
sented to him in that career in which he has 
started — that which comes to every man in the 
world. All this world has to say to any man 
that ever comes to it, or ever did come to it, 
comes in this voice: "You are the Son of God, 
and God has said so; yon place yourself in that 
position formally, as the Son of God. Now, 
then, I will ask you what a son of God should 
do. A son of God has great possibilities and 
powers. Kinship with God surrounds him 
with all the celestial. You make of this world 
the most there is of it. Just make of it what 
there is in it for you. Turn these stones into 
bread; the earth is covered with them; these 
are the conditions under which man is work- 
ing; that is the place for you, that is your time 
and that your opportunity." 

Oh, when we look at the age in which we 
live; when we see what these sons of God in 
this earth are doing with their intellectual 
powers, and all the forces of their nature, we 
know a voice like that is plainly heard, and 
men have been listening to it. When we see 
the tremendous power of the inventions and 
the resources of all the ages concentrated in 
one, that has piled up the stones of earth — for 
that is its equivalent — we know that some voice 
has been heard showing these truths. But 
when He came to testify to the truth He said, 



20 The Witness of Jesus 

"That is not the true life. The son of God 
has another life. Man lives not by bread 
alone. His body needs this, for it is made 
out of stone." You understand that perfectly 
well; all human bodies are built of bread that 
comes out of stones. We have only to go back 
in the geological age to see that the entire crust 
of this earth is stone, and the soil on it is 
ground up stone. It has all been made that 
way, and there is not au atom, or individual of 
us, or ever was, that did not come out of stone; 
there is not the body of an animal but came 
out of stone. Hence Jesus said: "But there 
is another life, I mean, that constitutes a man. 
There is something else; he needs another kind 
of bread. Man lives not by this only — this 
lower side of life, but man lives by bread that 
comes out of the mouth of God. This is my 
testimony. I am going to live that way. The 
mouth of the soul shall be open and God shall 
feed it on the loaves of infinite and everlasting 
truth. And all the powers of the soul should 
open wide the channels by which God speaks 
downward to the soul of man. This is the 
life of man; here is your life." 

What a witness that is! It is almost as 
strange now as it w&s when he came. In the 
presence of the age in which we live that one 
single Witness is standing testifying to the life 
of that side of man's nature which lives on 



The Witness of Jesus 21 

truth — all truth — truth that God makes us see 
in the stars or see in the Bible and in history. 
Truth is that on which the soul of man lives; 
this is its meaning. 

Now, we have this fact that we are all famil- 
iar with in our experience. We come so feebly 
into this world; we would not live at all — we 
could not live at all — if we were not fed on 
food that is nourishing and that gives strength 
to the body. A little child steps, but he stag- 
gers and falls. He will hurt himself; he cries, 
but we feed him and keep feeding him. Some 
day — it is not long — he walks and staggers not. 
He runs and stumbles not. This mind of 
yours, in the presence of these vast problems, 
lives on; it lives on the bread that comes out 
of the mouth of the great God. And some day 
you will be tempted and sin not. How are we 
to know the meaning of human life? How are 
we to know this vast problem of growth, of the 
world's life — the wisdom of the great Father 
who places us in this condition? Man should 
be led up to stronger growth, should be kept 
feeding, living, growing, and I see the time 
when men shall be tempted, and shall not 
yield to temptation. 

There are two other conditions that I can 
look at just a little to obtain a knowledge of 
the testimony of Jesus. The religious life of 
the age in which we live is like the religious 



22 The Witness of Jesus 

life of his age; when you come down to its 
causes, in all the ages. There were Pharisees 
and Sadducees. They made up the bulk of 
the world in that land then. They said, "We 
know how to look at God; we understand this 
problem;" and they came to him soon after the 
temptation and said, "Now he will tell us 
what to do; we have been taught; we have 
traditions which have come down to us three 
hundred years, and we have kept them from 
the fathers. God, our God, commissioned 
Moses, and he has handed it down by expo- 
sitions to us and we have this great law of life, 
explained, verified and hedged up by all tra- 
dition, explanation and commentary. ' ' Already 
there had been a reaction from that a little 
before in the form of another life. Men had 
seen that the Church, with its life, became 
artificial; that its life became a mere ritual; 
that its method became a mere profession. 
They went abroad and began to stand on the 
corners of the streets and pray; they began to 
wear broad phylacteries, to be expressly zeal- 
ous, to traverse sea and land to make one pros- 
elyte, and then devoured widows' houses; they 
could be as covetous in business as any other 
men. He had already seen that and there 
had been a great reaction from it, and it was 
called worldliness — the view of Sadduceeism; 
and they said, "We want better men; we want 



The Witness of Jesus 23 

simple, honest men. You take your traditions, 
your explanations, and your spirits and your 
resurrection of the body, and all your services, 
and we will take simply God's law, right or 
wrong, and we will take this world — this 
material world — as it is, and we will make 
out of it all there is in it and have the best 
time we can." That was Sadduceeism in its 
contrast to Phariseeism. And this is what 
comes up in our day as it did then. We have 
men who comply with the external services 
of religion, who deceive themselves in that 
particular that these professions constitute re- 
ligion. They think that if a man is extremely 
punctilious in the paying of his debts, per- 
formance of his duties, the saying of his pray- 
ers, in going through the services, he is re- 
ligious. If he has the candles and the vest- 
ments, and all those things, he is exceedingly 
religious. Every age has that same thing, and 
we have it in ours. There is sometimes a tre- 
mendous reaction; the church is having it now 
under the form of rationalism. It is the old 
Sadduceeism over again. Each age has looked 
at this, and we are just as near as they were. 
We conduct our business on principles as strict 
as they. We are as particular as they, so far 
as we can see, and we would each take advan- 
tage just like they would. The whole world 
now is immersed in just that kind of sin; it 



24 The Witness of Jesus 

goes on from age to age. Jesus, at the very 
threshold of life, says, "Neither your Pharisee- 
ism nor your Sadduceeism do I want anything 
to do with; both are wrong, and one is just as 
wrong as the other. A man who lives on the 
bread that comes out of the mouth of God has 
one life to live, and he wants each of his chil- 
dren to live in this service, and have all its 
pleasure. There is just one thing to do in this 
world — in this great life of service and of love 
— and I will show you how to do that." You 
go on reading the life of Jesus, and observe his 
methods — his testimony to humanity, to its 
worth, to what God thinks of it, to what his 
mission here in the world was, the opening of 
the eyes of the blind; causing of the deaf to hear; 
bringing a message of gladness to the heart; 
raising the dead; all these works of mercy and 
love in the service of humanity. This is his 
testimony. "Your life," said he, "is artificial; 
your life is purely theological — in harmony 
with the theory which the intellect has formed 
beforehand, both on the one side and on the 
other, but Pharisaic, ritualistic." 

The Sadducean philosophy hurts humanity. 
It is broken-hearted, diseased, suffering and dy- 
ing. What you want to do in this world is to 
help it to live that life of love and service to 
mankind. Jesus bore his testimony that way. 
Some day it will bring you into trouble; the 



The Witness of Jesus 25 

world is not very tolerant, and never will be, of 
any one who differs with it in religion or philos- 
ophy. It never has been. Many are witnesses 
to God's fidelity to them, for all have the same 
road to travel — every one. They said to Jesus, 
"If you live that kind of life it will bring 
you into the depth of sadness and woe." He 
said, "It is my Father's will." There will be 
Gethsemane for every one of God's children if 
they live up to this life. But there is a way out 
of this Gethsemane. The human heart that 
has found out the Father, and knows His love, 
who loves the Father and whom the Father 
loves, simply says, "Thy will be done!" and 
the sadness of that night will pass, and the 
Comforter will come and minister to him. To 
this human race this is always going on. You 
have seen these sons and daughters of God 
many a time in this Gethsemane. You have 
heard these heart-strings snap, and heard that 
cry going up, "O, my Father, this cup is so bit- 
ter, let it pass; nevertheless, not my will but 
thine be done!" 

Jesus bore witness, and we are bearing wit- 
ness, to the truth — the truth of life, the true re- 
lation of God to all and each in this world of 
ours — not abstract truth, or the truth of science. 

And then we have this other trouble, and I 
deem it but just to allude to it. When he 
stated these great problems, and the right way 



26 The Witness of Jesus 

to live, and what a man should do in the world, 
men had been seen of men to die, and the ques- 
tion comes up, What use, what benefit, what is 
gained by any particular kind of life, since the 
grave opens, and we all go the same way; since 
in the earth the young and the innocent, the 
beautiful and the old, the sinful and the pure, 
all lie down at last in the slumber of death? 
Oh, we need the Witness to tell us about this. 
We need a Witness that can come into the 
court of the universe and testify to the truth, 
and he is, as one of his apostles called him, "a 
faithful and true witness. ' ' He will testify living, 
but he will testify by his death and burial ; and 
when that issue is made in this world, and he 
has given his testimony, then "this world shall 
know that I love the Father and the Father 
loves me." 

He has borne his testimony to death; he has 
borne his testimony to life in the future, and 
whatever materialistic or other kind of thought 
may be introduced about the literal resurrec- 
tion, it does not make any difference to me. 

Take the eighteen hundred years of human 
heart- throbbings, and they look back and feel 
lighter since that time when these men said, 
"We talked with him afterwards. ' ' As they went 
over the world — the empires of the earth — they 
said, "We saw him; we talked with him!" 
The testimony on the one side and the other 



The Witness of Jesus 27 

shows the truth. Since that time life and im- 
mortality have been shining with brighter light. 
We know now that the Son of God, who loves 
the Father, the Son of the L,ord God Almighty, 
whom that Father loves, may go through Geth- 
semane, and he may go through the tomb, but 
he is living yet. 

This is a mere glance, but all that we have 
time to show to you this morning. Pilate had 
asked him, "Are you the King?" He said, 
"I leave that question to be decided in the 
future." Brethren, look over Christendom to- 
day; glance at millions like yourselves sitting 
in the houses of worship, looking up to this 
Jesus of Nazareth. Look at all the wills that 
have submitted themselves to the name of his 
Kingship. Is that a King? He did not look 
very much like a King in the hands of Pi- 
late, and in the hands of the mob — mocked 
and borne along under the cross; a crown 
of thorns upon him. He did not look like 
a King when they were bearing his broken 
and spoiled body to the grave. But since that 
time he reigns. What millions of men are do- 
ing things to-day because he says do it! What 
millions of men to-day are refraining from vices 
and wrong acts because the King hath said, "Do 
not do that!" Is that a King? Is that glori- 
ous being who, without a cent, without an 
army, without anything but his own infinite 



28 The Witness of Jesus 

glory, worth and beauty, simply by the majesty 
and the power of heavenly and glorious truth, 
has gotten absolute domination over the wills, 
the souls and the hearts of millions of men in 
this world — is that a Kingship? He has an- 
swered Pilate's question long ago, and every 
disciple of Jesus, every one who has come to 
him and said, "I want to be your subject; I 
want you to reign over me; I want your thought 
to control me; I want to share in that great em- 
pire of truth and love over which you reign," 
is a new witness to his Kingship. 

I do not wonder that these men said, "King 
of kings and L,ord of lords!" I do not wonder 
that he told the people to open their eyes, and 
that the saints shall reign until the kingdoms of 
this world become the kingdoms of our L,ord 
and his Christ. This is the answer to Pilate's 
question. The world shall know it. The ages 
shall find it out more and more; and as that em- 
pire grows, as that kingdom widens, as that 
scepter grows mightier, as that name becomes 
more glorious, as long as men live they will 
obey that eternal and glorious ideal of life. He 
will reign. "Art thou a King, then?" You 
can have your say about that, Pilate. The 
world will answer, and they will call him, 
"King of kings and L,ord of lords!" 



II 

THE CREATION— OLD AND NEW 

"For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus 
unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we 
should walk in them." — Eph. 2:10. 

There are very many conceptions and theo- 
ries of religion which in the last twenty years 
have undergone great transition in consequence 
of the increase of the world's knowledge of the 
universe. The advance of our knowledge of 
the world in which we live, of ourselves, has 
made obsolete a great many of our old ideas of 
religion, and modified a great many others. In 
no one subject that I know of has the change 
been greater than in regard to that which I 
have announced — our conception of creation. 

Twenty years ago, or a little more than that 
— most of you can remember the time — it was 
believed that God created everything that ex- 
ists, not only this world, but all the worlds; not 
only this planet, but all the planets, and the 
suns and stars, that are six thousand years old, 
in six days. I do not think that when I began 
to preach there was a suspicion anywhere, ex- 
cept, perhaps, one or two men in Europe — 
I scarcely knew of one in this country — that 
this was not so. I heard many sermons in re- 
gard to these matters at that time, and the be- 
29 



30 The Witness of Jesus 

lief everywhere expressed and fully received was 
that it was simply a vast fiat of God that threw 
these worlds out, and they have been shining 
since that time. When I was a youth attend- 
ing college a great many were looking at these 
conceptions, and our attention was directed to 
this thought about the Creator. But modern 
thought has pushed out these conceptions of 
creation, pushed them backward indefinitely. 
It has expanded the whole space upon which 
we look, and theories like that have dropped 
away from us. It was treated to some extent 
in that lecture on "Moses and Geology" you 
had not long ago. Men created in the book of 
Genesis an historical and scientific account of 
the beginning of the world, but when we began 
to think we found that we have no conception 
of the time that creation has been going on. 

The next thought was, "Well, what about 
Moses? What about the statements of the Bi- 
ble?" And if your position seems to be against 
the thoughts and the theories that we have in 
the Bible, then we have a great conflict. This 
is one of those things that have come up in our 
time, and disturbed the hearts and minds of 
good men and good women, just as it has been 
going on for the last three hundred years, over 
and over again. Now, the truth is, religious 
thought is always conservative. Religious 
thought is never progressive. Professor Win- 



The Creation — Old and New 31 

chell says faith in the heart of a man receives 
what has been handed down to him; sprinkles 
holy water on it, lays it down and keeps it, and 
is never willing for it to change. But intellect 
is looking out for the reasons, and the conflict 
that goes on in the world's history is precisely 
that conflict that goes on between your own 
heart and your own faith. He describes it 
about in this way: The intellect in a given 
time brings a truth to the heart; the heart ac- 
cepts, loves and trusts it. In a little while the 
intellect goes on another excursion, and finds 
out more, and brings that back to the heart, 
and says, "What I gave you before is not quite 
true; some of it not true at all; all of it incom- 
plete; we will have to change that." And the 
heart rebels. Thus the heart and the intellect 
are in eternal conflict. If you take human his- 
tory you will find that the ages fought one an- 
other, and that there was one long, continual 
conflict of faith against reason. We have just 
passed through a tremendous struggle of that 
kind. 

The word creation conveys to us now another 
thought occasioned by this tremendously en- 
riched knowledge from what we had when we 
began the study of religion. We think of cre- 
ation now as a method of divine working, not a 
fiat, while the great and good men who made 
our creeds say that God made all things out of 



32 The Witness of Jesus 

nothing. I think that thoughtful men every- 
where now know that to make something out of 
nothing is an unthinkable thing; you cannot 
think it. We may affirm that something is 
made out of nothing; that is, we can say the 
words, but the intellect has no thought of its 
meaning. There are a great many men who 
will tell you that they can think it. If they can, 
they can think much better thinking than I can. 
Bven so great and so accurate and largely 
equipped a man as James Freeman Clarke, in 
the appendix to one of his books, says he can, 
and he gives an illustration. He moves his 
hand, and says, "There was nothing there, was 
there?" And then he moves it again, thus, 
and says: "There is something — something 
made out of nothing." Well, when you come 
to analyze that, it means simply that there is 
something where there was nothing before, but 
something was not made out of nothing. A 
motion was not made out of nothing. There 
was a volition, and it was made by the most 
wonderful, the greatest something we are ac- 
quainted with. I can readily conceive that 
there may be something where there was noth- 
ing, but that something was made out of noth- 
ing, I confess I cannot think it. I do not try 
to get back and find out the infinite purpose of 
the great God, and the way in which he has 
made the world; it is a matter of faith; I believe 



The Creation — Old and New 33 

it. I simply believe that he is the infinite and 
adequate Cause of everything that exists, but 
just how it began to exist I do not know. That 
is all I can say, and I do not know anybody 
else who can say more. When I study the 
things that he has made, as the world is study- 
ing them now, I find precise laws and causes at 
work which I do know something about. I 
cannot know all about them, but I can know 
something about them. And these have come 
up in our time under the offensive name of "evo- 
lution," as the method of the divine working. 
Now, I will tell you frankly — I do not know 
whether I ever did so before — but I have been 
an evolutionist from the beginning, and have 
not been at all afraid to avow it. But by that I 
do not mean that evolution originated anything, 
no more than I can think of anything being 
originated at all out of nothing. I mean by 
that, the method by which God works. God 
has a method, an intelligent, regular, ordinary 
method of working in this universe, and he pro- 
duces these things by this method. When he 
makes a tree, he does not make roots, trunk, 
branches, leaves, and set it in the ground. He 
starts with a germ, a cell, and evolves the 
whole tree from beginning to end. And when 
we go from the natural to the animal kingdom, 
we see just the same process. And if we go 
back from that to the inorganic world, and 



34 The Witness of Jesus 

study the rocks, we study the same process 
there in what is called nebula. 

If that be true, then the inorganic world — 
the rocks, the earth, all there is in it, and the 
arrangement of it — has come just like a tree 
evolved from a seed. It has started, and is 
gradually being built up and evolved by similar 
processes. 

Now, therefore, when we use the word crea- 
tion, we have in our minds something very dif- 
ferent from its old meaning. And I am talking 
about these things simply that I may contrast 
them with the old idea that some of you may 
still have in your minds — that the universe, the 
world in which we live, with its structure, its 
strata and their contents, bones of animals, 
tracks, were all made when God simply said, 
"LET it be!" There are those who have 
come to me within the last year or two, and have 
told me they still believed that; that the tracks 
of these great animals in these strata, these 
creatures of immense size, that have passed 
away from the earth, but whose traces we have 
discovered, were made in this manner. But we 
do not think so now. These were here on the 
earth before man came. We can go just as far 
down as when he was here, and a long way far- 
ther thau man used to think of ; and this concep- 
tion now is in contrast with the one which we 
used to have. Now, then, the word ' 'creation" 



The Creation — Old and New 35 

was a keyword that we applied when we came to 
the New Testament. The idea that was in it 
should go with us to the New Testament. That 
is the thought that I have to present to you to- 
day. The process by which a man is changed 
from the state in which the Gospel finds him to 
a Christian man is called a "creation." With 
no idea of creation in the mind but that of a 
special fiat, men thought this creation was 
made in the same way; that the power by which 
the change is brought about in the soul of a 
Christian man was one like that when God made 
the rocks, the stars, the sun, simply by a special 
fiat, "LET it be!" and this theory you will 
find embedded in nearly all the creeds made in 
those times. It was the best men who thought 
thus, and the ideas are still there in the creeds, 
unchanged, although the minds of men have 
changed, and men do not believe them. If you 
read your history you will find that it is so; that 
men could not think otherwise. How could a 
man, when he saw the word creation in the New 
Testament, in a verse like that which I have read 
to you this morning, where the apostle says, 
"We are his workmanship, created in Christ 
Jesus to good works, which God hath before 
ordained that we should walk in them," and 
when he had but the one idea about creation, as 
the word "creation" was understood then — how 
could he think of any different process than the 



36 The Witness of Jesus 

one he believed to have been followed in the old 
creation? You can thus see the foundation of 
that old theology, the great theological process 
of conversion, or the new birth, or the change, 
whatever you call it. The foundation of that 
old theology rested upon an inadequate concep- 
tion of what the word "creation" meant. 

And now, when we have a different idea of 
creation; when it brings to our minds the con- 
ception of a vast, infinite, intelligent Being, 
working according to the law of cause in the 
universe, by regular and ordinary processes, and 
then read the word "creation" in the work of 
the Christian, we transfer the same meaning 
there. This has made the great change that 
has gone on in our time in the pulpit and in the 
world's thought. 

I call your attention to a few passages, and 
the manner in which they can be interpreted by 
both of these lines of thought and meaning. 
The apostle, in a little paragraph in this letter, 
with which you are very familiar, referring to 
his visit to the people of Kphesus, and to what 
occurred by reason of his being present among 
them, said: "This I say, therefore, and testify 
in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as 
other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their 
mind." They were walking with false concep- 
tions and feelings about themselves and about 
God and the universe, which he designated by 



The Creation — Old and New 37 

the word " vanity." And he states what this is 
— the process of having the understanding 
darkened. He knew very well the connection 
between the intellectual nature of man and what 
we call the sensibilities of the heart. He says 
that the understanding was darkened, and alien- 
ation from the true life of God was one of the 
results. They were alienated from the life of 
God through their ignorance , and because of this 
blindness of the heart, this deadness, so hard 
to get away from, they gave themselves over to 
vanity. Here we have the psychology of the 
Apostle Paul, which is true, so far as we have 
learned, of the understanding, the sensibilities 
of the heart, and the will. When you think 
and feel toward God with the understanding 
blinded and the heart alienated, you are given 
over to work all uncleanness and greediness. 

Now, this fact of man's alienation from God, 
which the apostle accounts for by the ignorance 
of men, reaching back to the fall of man, could 
not be illustrated by the old theologians except 
by the theory of making the universe out of 
nothing. I heard two of the most distinguished 
men I have ever known in the pulpit affirm that 
this power of the new birth, the birth in the 
soul, which is called creation, is the same as 
that act by which the universe was brought 
into being by the infinite Jehovah. If I would 
call their names many of you would know 



38 The Witness of Jesus 

them. And I can refer you to a dozen books in 
which the same theory is argued by men promi- 
nent in the world, some of whom are still liv- 
ing. Here the apostle simply goes into the 
minds of these cultivated people at Kphesus, 
and traces the process from where the mind does 
not know, the heart does not feel, and the will 
control, to that state when it does know and 
feel. The process of the new creation is 
brought out here just like that beautiful process 
in the old creation. We take human nature as 
we find it — the heart, the mind, the sensibili- 
ties, the will; the thing to do is to teach it. 

Jesus said to these men, "Go and teach. " 
That is the means, the power, that is going to 
create the work of change in the human mind. 
You see that truth stated over and over again, 
that teaching is the means by which to change 
the mind that is ignorant, and guide the sensi- 
bilities of a heart that has gone wrong, placing 
images in the mind which that mind and that 
heart can be influenced by. How can you force 
the will of a man to act unless you adopt these 
methods? This is what the apostle means when 
he says, "Put off the old man that is corrupt 
according to the deceitful lusts." The "old 
man" was the ignorant man, the man of insen- 
sibility, the man who was going wrong, and 
"put on the new man;" and he is made new by 
knowledge — that is the first thing, the usual 



The Creation — Old and New 39 

process. He is made new in righteousness. 
And there is a method in making a man new in 
righteousness. There is a process in making 
the sensibilities right and renewing the heart in 
holiness, which has reference to a man's acting, 
keeping away from the unclean vices he in- 
dulged in before. Now we have what it is 
changed from, and the thing changed, and the 
process by which he was changed; and the apos- 
tle calls this creatioji, a creating a man over 
again, making a new man of him. He tells us 
that when a vile man wakes up to these higher 
sensibilities, when he takes hold of the beauti- 
ful truth and the goodness of God as illustrated 
in Christ, these powers of the intellect and 
heart, that carry the will with them, change, 
and the man, instead of working all unclean- 
ness and greediness, will labor in holiness now, 
and do good with enthusiasm. You have thus 
the process. At first he merely receives it, 
and the apostle says that is what is creating a 
man in Christ Jesus — learning the truth as it is 
in him. 

We have now the true conception of the 
whole matter. We think we have an idea of 
what a man ought to be when we see him in 
Christ. He has revealed God to us, and we see 
the Father; he has revealed God as the infinite 
Father. But that is only a part of his revela- 
tion. He has given us a true conception of 



40 The Witness of Jesus 

what a man ought to be, and will be if he is 
faithful. He has placed that before us, and 
when you place the knowledge of God as 
brought to us in Christ, and the knowledge of 
man as God means the man shall be, we can put 
together the true knowledge of that universe of 
which man forms a part. Then you have the 
motive and the reason, and the evidence by 
which man is elevated, step by step, in the or- 
dinary order of progress in the spiritual world, 
the same as goes on in the organic world and 
the world below us. Wherefore, the word "cre- 
ation" now means an entirely different thing. 
And hence the whole theory of conversion is 
changing from what it used to be. The idea is 
changing. 

And this illustrates, as well as any point I can 
state, how it is that a true knowledge of nature, 
of the universe, and of man, which is a very 
modern thing spread out before the mind and 
the heart of man, has caused to drop away the 
old conceptions of religion. The modern 
thought has given us newer, higher and more 
beautiful conceptions in regard to it. This 
Bible idea, coming to us in our day as a new 
thought, the church has opposed. The church 
never fails to make war against every new truth 
that God brings to this world. It is a sad thing 
for me to say, but it is a true thing, and we may 
just as well say the truth. Copernicus, Gal- 



The Creation — Old and New 41 

lileo, Kepler, Newton, Hugh Miller and L,yell — 
all these men belong to one class, and stand out 
there alone as the objects of obloquy and abuse, 
which the church has thrown upon them 
through the centuries. These men were proph- 
ets of nature that God sent to the world to en- 
lighten it, and the church has been their great 
opponent. It was the same in regard to this 
new idea of creation, when Darwin and Spen- 
cer and these other men began to say to us, 
"You don't know enough about it; you had 
better look into the creation again." 

Now we can see the better conception of man 
in having that idea of what creation is, by these 
vast divine processes going on in him now — 
teaching, exhorting, purifying — and we can 
have some better idea of what glorifying him 
means. This book is a set of voices that we 
begin to hear with knowledge. We write them 
down and then read them out. But how about 
the man after he is completed, and this process 
is over? We have that man in spirit anew, but 
that is not the end of it. L,et him be made 
new; let him have God's thought; let him love 
the same thing which God loves; let him have 
his will strengthened that he can walk the path 
of righteousness; let him be called in this world 
and be a righteous man, a Christian man, the 
highest type of man, and that does not satisfy 
him. Living still, he wants to get something 



42 The Witness of Jesus 

better. The very body that belongs to him is a 
part of the process in this waste; in that sense 
it is old. Yes, these words are metaphorical, so 
if a man gets old, dissolves, goes away, he may 
have a new heart, new thought, new kinship 
with God, new aspirations of heaven. But man 
is fading away, even this kind of man, this 
truest and best life in the world, so dear unto 
the Father. And then what? The thought 
conies — there is no way to escape it — This is not 
the end of it. There must be another world. 
There must be a better world. There must be 
some place in the universe for that man who 
has been the image of God, where he can live 
on, a place of sensibility, of volition, for his fac- 
ulties to go on in the activities to which they 
have been awakened, and to which they have 
been directed, in those new and divine motives. 
And then we have this Book talking to us about 
that new and eternal life, and a new light is re- 
ceived. When you look forward to the future, 
if there is any great fact seen there along the 
line of the aspirations, hopes and reasoning that 
belong to a man, it is, that we do not want to 
live here after we have been made anew, in the 
image of him who created us. If we think like 
God, feel like God, and look like God, and have 
God's image, if we have been made anew, we 
do not want to live on from age to age where 
there has been so much sorrow, so many tears, 



The Creation — Old and New 43 

close by the forms of those who lived, in the 
presence of those deserted lives, sometimes 
characters blighted, with the childhood grow- 
ing up around you. This is not a suitable 
world for man to live in forever — a man of this 
divine image. There is a new world, a crea- 
tion, that is before us, a new heaven and a new 
earth, to which a man shall attain, where these 
things shall not be. One of the words that come 
to us, which fill the heart with song, when 
we are listening to the voice, is, "I will make 
all things new." 

Yet we have reversed God's conception. He 
works from the old to the new. He is making 
something new all the time; but we want to go 
from the new to the old. He goes back over the 
traces of the old world, and makes them new 
all the time, and after awhile he says, "When 
you have dropped this old body, and these old 
lives — these things you have had long enough, 
the things which are applicable to this life — be- 
hold, all things will be made new — a new man, a 
new body, a new world, with new activities, new 
joys, new employments, new hopes, new happi- 
ness, new glories, a new future, making all things 
new." It seems to me that people ought to live 
with that sort of a fact before them, and in har- 
mony with that whole conception. That is how 
I see it; that is what I read of the creation, and 
of man, and of the future. This brings before 



44 The Witness of Jesus 

us something worthy of God, of man and his 
destiny. And I read this word "creation" 
anew, and I get the thought which I read there, 
too, and I carry it from the Bible and place it 
up there. And God has placed it in the blue 
heaven, the heaven of the human heart, and we 
see a new heaven, and a new earth, and a new 
life. And immediately after we read this about 
them: "There shall be no more dying, no death 
and no sorrow, no pain, no more tears." That 
which has made these will drop away, and "Be- 
hold, all things have become new." 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

The greatest power of which we can have 
any knowledge in this world in the making of 
things new is love. It is the vast, infinite re- 
newer, like the sunlight, which is a symbol of 
love, renewing the heavens and the earth, as 
the old psalmist, looking upon the earth, said, 
"All nature changes and becomes new." Now, 
all the new homes in the world, and the new 
lives, and the new joys that spring out of them, 
come from, love; and when God wants to give us 
a taste of the new home, the new heaven, the 
new Jerusalem, he shows us his love. When 
he wants to fill the human heart with some an- 
ticipation of that which overflows, that new in- 



The Creation — Old and New 45 

spiration, lie shows us his infinite love in Christ. 
And that is what this ordinance means. It 
comes to us once more, always in harmony with 
God's greatest thoughts toward us, renewing 
the soul from week to week, making it diviner, 
stronger; filling it with hope and light. And 
this is the effect of love, by which his' own 
great heart comes into ours, his thought into 
our thought, as it is shown to us in Christ. 
This renewing is going on always, and this is 
what this institution means, that, looking at 
this great, divine, infinite force in God's heart, 
this is to make you new in your hopes, joys, re- 
ligious life, aspirations, energies, from week to 
week, through the pilgrimage here, with regard 
to a life to come. 

PRAYKR. 

We thank Thee, our great and glorious Fa- 
ther, as we come again into Thy presence in 
this divine spectacle of infinite love. We adore 
Thee for the meaning of the cross. We adore 
Thee, infinite Father, that we see the power of 
Thy love; that we see the change from this life 
to new and everlasting glory. We thank Thee 
that to-day we can come in deep consciousness 
that we are the recipients of Thy love. If in 
this life we should fall, yet we are feeding, liv- 
ing upon what comes to us in this life of Jesus. 
Quicken our faith. Lift up our faces. Open the 
eyes of the soul, O God, that we may see and 
take in new realizations of Thy love to us as we 



46 The Witness of Jesus 

view it anew in this ordinance. We pray 
Thee to bless all of us who are present, and 
grant that this may be to us a realization of the 
power of that divine life that showed itself to us 
in Christ Jesus, so that it may transform, 
strengthen and lead us into the light of Thy 
presence. And to Thy name we will give all 
the praise, through Jesus, now and forever. 
Amen. 



Ill 

THE COMING ONE 

"Now when John had heard in prison the works of 
Christ, he sent two of his disciples, and said unto him, 
Art thou he that should come, or do we look for an- 
other? Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and show 
John again those things which you do hear and see: the 
blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are 
cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and 
the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is 
he whosoever shall not be offended in me." — Matt. 11:2-6. 

There are some questions in religion, as in 
all other forms of thought, that are funda- 
mental, that lie at the foundation of the whole 
system. And there are questions just like these, 
which we have when we study, in every depart- 
ment in the universe, that leave us gazing for- 
ever at the eternal mysteries of God — questions 
that lie along the border line of the infinite, 
where our finite minds go just as far as we can 
see, and then we feel that we are seeing only a 
little way into the infinite thought of the great 
God. And this I regard, so far as our race is 
concerned, as one of these instances. 

These disciples were sent by John the Bap- 
tist to ask the great Teacher this question, 
"Art thou He that should come, or do we look 
for another?" I call your attention to what is 
implied, rather than to what is expressed, in 

this inquiry. John the Baptist, like all of us 

47 



48 The Witness of Jesus 

in troubled life, had clouds over him. He had 
become uncertain in regard to the things which 
once had appeared to him to be very clear. As 
we read this record we see that, when he bap- 
tized Jesus, he was made to feel very certain that 
the One to come was present, when, of the One 
that was to come after him he said, "Behold, 
the Lamb of God!" But now things have tak- 
en another turn. The mission on which he 
had been sent by the infinite Father, the last 
great message of infinite truth and love to the 
world which he had been instrumental in 
announcing, was done, and he, himself, the 
messenger of God, was in the hands of the 
jailers of a wretched prison. He hears the re- 
ports and rumors of that One whom he had in- 
troduced to the people, and to reassure himself, 
to establish his own heart again in the convic- 
tion which had so joyfully rilled it, he sent 
these disciples to make a personal inquiry, and 
they present to Him the great fundamental 
question here heard: "Art thou he that should 
come, or do we look for another?" 

What is assumed in this question is this: 
that some one must come. Tbey simply ask, 
"Are you He?" Now the question that meets 
us — and it is a living question that has come up 
to us again from the centuries and is standing 
before us face to face — is, Why should anyone 
come at all? With our world and our nature, 



The Coming One 49 

and with the way men live, when we study 
their experience, thoughts, hopes and fears, 
why should it have been made a part of this vast 
system of human life that some one should come? 
Why should not the world thus civilized be 
evolved, in its normal processes, from age to age, 
from generation to generation, from religion to 
religion, until gradually, by this long evolution 
of things, man should reach his destiny and the 
great purpose of God be accomplished? That 
question is natural to the human heart, and it 
is asking it. This simple question, this human 
assumption, by this prophet in prison who sent 
the disciples, shows that he takes for granted 
the great fact that some one is to come. Why 
should it be so? 

Now I do not know that we can answer this 
question. We can look a little while at the 
facts — at the experiences of men. This much 
we can say in regard to it; that in nearly all, 
if not all the races and civilizations that have 
lived on this planet, that has been the feel- 
ing. We know tolerably well now, what were 
the beliefs, the superstitions and the fears of 
the old races that lived here; and when we go 
back and exhume them from their ruins and 
study the heart-throbs and experiences of the 
dead ages and races, we find that they were 
looking, like us, for some one to come. We 
study the religions of whole ages, and they are 



5<d The Witness of Jesus 

made up largely of the expectation of the ar- 
rival of some one; some one, perhaps, who had 
been here, who has been thus remembered, who 
will come again. If we take the religions of 
old Babylon and Chaldea, and examine them, 
there the human heart is still throbbing and 
palpitating with expectation. Somebody must 
come. And if we go into the religion of Asia, 
how many incarnations of Buddha have already 
been, and how many must still be before this 
human heart is stilled forever! And when we go 
to the religions of Persia, there remain to this day 
prophecies that, at the end of definite periods, 
there will be the appearing of the star and the 
coming of the great prophets and guides of hu- 
manity. So that it is true, whether we can 
account for it or not, that among the millions 
that have lived, thought and worshiped on this 
planet, the human heart has not been able to 
beat, to go on and live, without believing in 
some one to come. We can more readily ac- 
count for this belief in the mind of a Jew — 
a man with the Scriptures of the Old Testa- 
ment in his hand, gathering up the prophecies 
of the past, from the time that it was said "the 
serpent shall bruise the heel of humanity and 
humanity shall bruise its head," onward down. 
But a question lies behind that, this same ques- 
tion we find among the other races: Why should 
there have been these prophecies and how were 



The Coming One 51 

these prophecies made? I wish to call your 
attention just for a little while to this question. 
It is one that is growing in interest every day 
— how it happened that these old prophets and 
seers of the past, when they opened the eyes of 
the soul upon the roll of the great future, were 
continually seeing forms that were appearing 
in the distance of some one to come. We know 
that just before the time these prophecies were 
uttered, there were voices from the Gentile 
world, indicating the same expectation. Many 
of you have read the beautiful L,atin Song of 
Virgil — Philo and his Son — who would bring 
in the golden age. I have time only to allude 
to these facts; they are historical facts; they are 
not dreams nor imaginings to make out the 
case. We want to see the history of human 
experience, of human thought, of the human 
heart, in its deepest feelings, just as they 
are. This position the Jews occupied just as 
we d®. I want to say this, that we may keep 
our minds upon that issue for a short time, 
while we investigate. The Jew is compelled, 
when we go back in his past history, to believe 
in some one to come. That conviction is forced 
into his mind and riveted in his heart, by his 
experience. He is obliged to believe in pes- 
simism or in a coming One. You know what 
pessimism is. We express it in our day by 
saying, "All things are going to the bad.'' 



52 The Witness of Jesus 

That is not quite it. It is all things going to 
the worst. According to pessimism everything 
that man sees and knows and loves — the earth, 
the race — is getting worse and worse, until de- 
struction and death. That is what we mean 
by the word pessimism. Now that issue was 
made with the Jews and it is made with us in 
the same way. Here is a race that appears 
among the other races some 2000 years before 
our era, with the conception of the unity of 
God; a few hundred years afterwards this con- 
ception is solidified into a religion and is given 
to them by that great lawgiver, that God is 
one; that he is infinitely holy and just; and that 
he has a moral government over them and over 
the world. They entertained that view. We 
know what the races were that lived around 
these people; we know what the religious of 
Egypt were, that polytheism and superstition 
were theirs. We know what all the religions 
east of them — east of the Euphrates and be- 
yond, were — idolatries, polytheism, supersti- 
tion, without moral character. We know when 
we read the Bible what the religions of the 
people north of them were, the people of Tyre, 
and in that direction; the names of the gods 
and the corrupt forms of worship lie in history 
before us. We know that when you cross the 
Mediterranean and all west of them there was a 
polytheism, more refined perhaps, a form of 



The Coming One 53 

thought more beautiful, but superstition, poly- 
theism, with no moral character in their gods. 
Here is a man that stands up before one people 
and says: "Hear, O Israel, the I^ord thy God 
is one. He built this universe, planned it all, 
and made it all; he is righteous, infinitely 
holy, infinitely just, infinitely truthful; and He 
has a government — a moral government — for 
you and for the world. " No one questions 
these great historical facts. What would you 
think if you were there in his place? We know 
the true God; He knows us; we know his char- 
acter", we know his will somewhat; we know 
his law; we have entered into a covenant with 
him and he has entered into a covenant with 
us. We know all of that. The other races 
that are on this earth are ignorant and en- 
slaved, corrupt, bound up in falsehood. Now, 
what is to be the issue? These races are in 
conflict; what ought to be the issue? We ex- 
press it in our time by an utterance that comes 
from one of the old poets — not one of the He- 
brew poets: — "The truth is mighty above all 
things and will prevail." We have to believe 
in God. We have to believe in the ultimate 
triumph of truth. We have to believe in the 
ultimate triumph of right. We have to believe 
in the ultimate supremacy of pure character. 
God has made the human mind to believe that, 
if it believes anything. These races start out 



54 The Witness of Jesus 

on their career, one by the side of the other, 
with that deepest conviction of the human 
heart. Now, while they are believing and liv- 
ing that way, here comes one of the most cor- 
rupt of those great powers and takes this people 
that has the truth, — that has the conception of 
the right, — and carries them over into its own 
country, and puts its heel on their neck. And 
the wrong has prevailed; superstition is on top; 
ignorance has conquered. But the Jew has the 
faith and holds it on right ground. He says, 
• ' We were not faithful to the trust which God 
has put in our hands, and that is the reason we 
have been defeated this time. But it will not 
always be that way." Even in his captivity 
he still believes that truth prevails. He can 
not believe anything else. Then after awhile 
— two tribes were left — another opportunity is 
given to them to take hold of that great truth 
God has placed in trust in their hands, which is 
worth to the world so much. It is worth more 
than Israel; God tells them that all the time. 
This truth, this form of thought and religion, 
is worth more to humanity than you are. One 
or the other must go; it will be you, not that. 
God has written that on the face of the history 
of the past. They continued unfaithful; there 
were always men who saw it, and told it, — men 
raised up by their surroundings, and by the 
help of God, to show the issue between truth 



The Coming One 55 

and falsehood, right and wrong, as represented 
by this religion. And they said to the people, 
"You will fare the same as other nations unless 
you are true to that trust." And after awhile 
they came to the issue that either the truth 
must fail or Israel must go. And then Israel 
had to go. But as I have said, the Jew held 
on, in his captivity, and by misfortune he 
learned as we learn. We do not see the stars 
and the glories of the heavens until night 
comes. When the night of exile and darkness 
settled on Israel, he saw the glory of God, and 
then he is brought back again. I will not go 
into the details of how the Persians came and 
conquered their country; and how the Jews 
were brought back. Then he says, "We believe 
in the unity of God now; we understand it now; 
and now is Israel to rule the world in covenant 
with God, and God in covenant with Israel; 
the truth taught to humanity shall lead the 
world." And we have the most splendid of 
those utterances by the psalmist, just when 
the hopes are breaking in their hearts. But 
they have not been there very long until Alex- 
ander the Great comes along — a master of one 
of those great worlds, those superstitious pow- 
ers — and puts his heel on their neck again. 
And then, a little while after that, when his 
empire breaks up and one of his generals takes 
Egypt and another Syria, and they get to quar- 



56 The Witness of Jesus 

relitig about Palestine, then we have both of 
these oppressing them, a terrific persecution. 
And finally Antiochus says, "We must extin- 
guish Judaism;" and he makes a decree that 
their temple shall be made a temple of Jupiter, 
and their capital shall be destroyed. And he 
found enough apostate Jews to become spies in 
the homes of the Jews. He took all the old 
books and burned them up, and sent his gener- 
als over there to crush, destroy and exile them. 
Then came that terrific revolution of the Mac- 
cabees, where was patriotism, the like of which 
has never been on this planet. The old men 
and their sons gave their lives, and finally the 
people gained their freedom again. We have 
exultation after exultation to celebrate this tri- 
umph; and while they are triumphing, while 
they have now the God of Israel, the God of 
Abraham and Jacob, the God of righteousness, 
the truth of the universe is going to be known 
and Israel becomes leader of humanity, and it 
holds that truth. But Rome comes along and 
puts its hand on it. What would you think if 
you were there, complete in the triumph of 
truth and right, and yet superstition and ignor- 
ance holding it down all the time? A long 
time has been given to humanity to find out 
whether these people can work it out them- 
selves; and at last the conclusion is reached. 
It must be done if the universe is to exist 



The Coming One 57 

for anything; if truth is worth anything for 
humanity at all; if this conception of the uni- 
verse and of righteousness is of any value to the 
human race. We have had, all these ages, a 
superstition that crushed us down; but if right- 
eousness reigns, somebody must come and take 
the lead. 

And so it is that out of the very experience 
of history God teaches men. These prophets 
— Hosea, Isaiah and Micah— seeing these is- 
sues as they came, looking along these lines, 
put them on record; and that is prophecy. I 
know you will not think with me that way; 
you may differ with me as to how prophecy 
came. And it is a good thing to have differ- 
ence. There is an opportunity to know some- 
thing when men differ; and there would not 
be a possibility of anyone's ever knowing any- 
thing if all the world were agreed. If this 
whole race held one thing, the race would be 
like that bluff down at the river; it would stay 
at one place forever. But when I think one 
thing, and you another, then we have the pow- 
er of learning what the difference is between 
us. That is how the world moves; and it can 
not move any other way. It doesn't matter 
now what is your interpretation of words. I 
am talking about these great facts — what these 
men saw. It is the line of causation in the 
moral universe of God that makes prophecy. 



58 The Witness of Jesus 

Logic and philosophy may talk a great deal 
about it, but to apprehend all the working of 
the great law of causation in the world of mind 
requires something more than these. I see the 
working of the laws of nature, of cause and ef- 
fect, in the material world. That is universal, 
and I can take hold of that law and follow it a 
good way among material things. The same 
law reigns in the great world of mind. We see 
one truth, and if that is true, then something 
else follows; and if we can see far enough along 
this line of causation, we can predict; we can 
prophesy. There were men lifted up high 
enough, by the help of the infinite God, to see 
the reign of this great law of cause and effect, 
or, if you prefer it, antecedent and consequent, 
in the world ; and they have told us this thing — 
that some One must come. 

And after awhile there came a Jew from the 
lake of Galilee, and he began to talk, and men 
began to think. "We have found him of whom 
Moses and the prophets did write; they said 
some one must come." This was the sum ©f 
the preaching of John the Baptist — the coming 
of Jesus Christ. It was the experience of the 
human heart, and when the men met him, they 
said, "Are you that man?" All the world 
knows the human heart would break; it cannot 
beat without that some One to come. Is it the 
question to us to-day? I may take it up and 



The Coming One 59 

make it mine. Iyiving in this same world, 
with all its dangers, with all its clefts and 
abysses abont me, looking upward and down- 
ward, I want to ask for myself, "Art thou He?" 
And that is the way man should begin to look 
at this question. It is not a mere thing of the 
book — a religion of that kind given to us. But 
it is often so; I am sorry it is so; but that is 
just like everything else. A man comes along 
who has gotten some faint glimpse of the mind 
of the great, infinite One. He discovers some 
lines of reasoning, includes a mass of logic, 
works it out and puts it in a book; and after 
the student studies the book through he 
begins to repeat the book; and this we call 
"cramming" in the public schools. We have 
the same thing in religion. But here were men 
who looked at the reality of things — the moral 
order of the universe — who looked down into 
the dispositions of the human heart and felt its 
throb and knew its experience, and they come 
to every living person here in the world and tell 
what they have heard: that some one must 
come — and they asked, "Are you he?" And 
then we go and put it in the book; and if I 
want to prove it, I will take that text and see 
that the text proves it. That makes our re- 
ligion superficial, like our education. We want 
to get down to the reality ; to bring our hearts 
and consciences in their depths, face to face 



60 The Witness of Jesus 

with destiny. For me, is there some one to 
come? That is the question we want to ask. 
Now Jesus of Nazareth has been accepted for 
these centuries as He that should come. And I 
just want to call your attention to his answer to 
John's inquiry: "Tell John this," he said, and 
He gave him three couplets, embracing six 
things, in which he summed up the ailments 
and needs of humanity. "The blind receive 
their sight; the lame walk; the lepers are 
cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised 
up and the poor have the gospel preached to 
them." "Tell him that," said Jesus, "and he 
will know, himself." That is the answer. I 
want to ask you to look just a moment at the 
method of the teaching of this Nazarene. He 
is not a superficial theorist. He is looking at 
man; looking at the depths of the souls of men, 
to their needs. When he said, "blind" he did 
not merely mean the man that had lost the sight 
of the eye. You can see how he has used that 
word in so many places. It means vastly more 
than that. There are those who have eyes, and 
do not see at all; and there are those who have 
no eyes and do see. He is looking at the eyes 
of the body and the eyes of the soul, both. 
Sometimes a man has no outward vision, and 
yet he has splendid vision after all. It has not 
been more than a week since I went to Kansas 
City with a blind man — Col. Jones; and I was 



The Coming One 61 

hunting for a place and did not know exactly 
where it was. He said, I will show you, and 
he took me to it, just as -if he had the best eyes 
in the city. He had another set of eyes; he 
knew each street we were on and how to get 
there. I heard Milburn deliver a lecture in 
Kansas City on "What a Blind Man Saw in 
Paris," and I have not heard a better represen- 
tation, a better picture of French thought, 
French civilization, and French life, than he 
gave. He could not see, but we know he had 
been there and had seen what a blind man 
could see in Paris. We have more eyes than 
this, and so we have another sight. We have 
also blindness of the eye of the body, that cuts 
off from us the light of the sun, moon and stars, 
and then we have another blindness — the blind- 
ness of the soul, that cuts off the light of God, 
which is represented in those words, "If the 
light that is in thee be darkness, how dark 
shall that darkness be!" This refers to the 
soul. He says, "Tell John the blind receive 
their sight." It is true that he had opened the 
eyes of Bartimaeus and a few other blind men, 
but I cannot prove that he will open mine. I 
cannot prove that there is anyone here who 
will do that; but he is going to open the other 
eyes. Visions of the universe; visions of the 
glory, wisdom and power of the great God, may 
open, and the world be blind to them and not 



62 The Witness of Jesus 

see them. God is there, but they do not have 
any idea of it; they do not see Him. He said, 
"They receive their sight; tell him that." 

"And the lame walk." When a man is blind 
he loses activity. He has to sit down in the 
corner and lose his strength. Just so with the 
world; put out the eyes of the soul, of the in- 
tellect, and then the activities that make the 
mind great cannot be called out; it makes peo- 
ple shrink down into nothing. That was the 
civilization in which he lived. Morally it was 
dead. The lame will walk when they get their 
eyes opened upon God. When they see the 
splendors and the glories of the infinite Father, 
his power will thrill them to the soul, and man 
will stand up again in the image and glory of 
God. 

"The lepers are cleansed." Do you think 
he felt so great a concern about diseases of the 
skin that the Son of Man should come from 
heaven to earth to cure them? There were 
physicians here already. He would not have 
come for that. He makes that a type of an- 
other leprosy — of another disease. The leprosy 
meant is moral; the bad man is in great calam- 
ity and misfortune, having a disease like lep- 
rosy — the leprosy of the soul. That is what 
man needed to have cured; and Jesus was look- 
ing at that. He looks below the mere surface, 
and this is His way of teaching. If you study 



The Coming One 63 

trim you will see that his meaning goes below; 
and when he says " the lepers are cleansed," he 
means that disease that comes to the human 
soul. O how a man is hurt by this vast and 
awful disease of sin! 

"And the deaf hear." That is just like the 
blind; I need not dwell on that. You hear the 
sounds of earth and its voices, but there are 
emotions of the human heart that cause us to 
listen to voices that are being spoken from lips 
more eloquent than those of angels. The soul 
is listening, and nobody speaks. You can sit 
down in your chamber and go with your eyes 
all over this book; and you can go quietly and 
look at the stars of heaven; you can get out in 
the morning and look at the sky, and you are 
listening. "The heavens are telling," as the 
song says; the earth is whispering; God is^talk- 
ing; the deaf hear when the ear of the soul has 
been opened, and listens. 

And more than that, "the dead are raised 
up." Do you think he felt such vast concern 
about the resurrection of a few people from 
the dead? He raised only a few; but that was 
not simply for their sakes. He said, "The hour 
is coming and now is when the dead shall hear 
the voice of the Son of God." He did not 
mean the dust in the grave; he meant men who 
are indifferent; whose souls have died to the 
realities of life, of the universe, and feel no in- 



64 The Witness of Jesus 

terest in it; men whose energies and activities 
are directed to material things. 

There is a death of the soul. One of our 
songs says — 

"Whose pangs outlast the fleeting breath; 

Oh, what eternal horrors hang 
Around that awful death" — 

the death of the soul. Now, Jesus says, I have 
come to wake it up and bring it to life again; 
and that is here connected with the hearing. 
The voice of God is speaking to all humanity, 
and the soul shall hear it, and it will raise that 
listening soul from the dead. Just think of the 
living souls before God! 

I may add but one thing now: Gladness is 
in the vast congregations all over the earth 
that "the poor have the gospel preached to 
them." I can merely refer to this feature. Go 
from one ocean to another, and then go to Eu- 
rope and see the poverty — the great curse of 
our human nature. So many foolish things 
are said to us about being poor, and the 
churches say so many silly things about it. 
Poverty is put down here by our Lord Jesus 
Christ as among the deepest and greatest afflic- 
tions of humanity, and the man who is worth 
anything and has a soul worth saving at all 
wants to get away from it. You never saw a 
man reconciled to it unless he had lost the ca- 
pabilities of himself and his life. No man loves 



The Coming One 65 

poverty. Reason shows that when God made 
the soul of man he endowed it with the con- 
sciousness that it was to have an estate. You 
may strip him until he is a pauper, and he 
is never reconciled to it; if he has any heart in 
him at all he wants to get away from it. The 
great want of man is ownership — estate, life, 
and abundant life. He wants to be gathering, 
and if you had seen the poverty in Palestine as 
Jesus saw it, you would not think the poverty 
we have amounts to much. And this is the 
reason he has that message of gladness to them. 
I have come that the eyes may be opened, that 
the paralyzed limbs may be moved; that the 
leprosy of the soul may be taken away; that a 
man may be clean and healthy in heart before 
God ; I have come to tell him about the Father 
and the Son; I have come to reveal to him the 
infinite wealth of the vast estate given by the 
Father, and I have come to show him that he 
is heir to it. I have come with a message that 
will make the soul of the poorest man on earth 
glad. I have come to tell him that his poverty 
is just a little temporary thing, and does not 
last long; that he can be rich, rich as the Son 
of God, and a joint heir with all the ownership 
of the universe. He will know whether I am 
the One to come or not. 

Now, this is the message to us. What we 
have to rely upon is, Is He doing this to us? 



66 The Witness of Jesus 

His ministry is still going on among the peo- 
ple. What millions of eyes has he opened! 
What visions of gladness and glory has he 
shown! What millions of paralyzed sonls has 
he brought to life, that have leaped like the 
hart! What millions has he touched where 
leprosy has gone through the soul, and the man 
stands up before God! What laboring millions 
are singing to-day, all over the earth, even in 
poverty — saying, "Blessed is poverty, as it will 
make a man desire that wealth!" What millions 
of these are looking up and singing out of their 
burdened hearts, because of the children of God 
sharing in the everlasting life! Is he doing 
that? 

"Art thou he that should come, or do we 
look for another?" Do I want to see God the 
Father? Do I want my heart cleansed? Do I 
want an estate? Then let me go and ask him; 
he has done that for me. Oh, can he take 
these things from me, and leave me that word? 
Then why should I look for another? If he is 
to come and take from the human soul all its 
burdens and crosses, why should there be an- 
other? If he takes the blindness and the lame- 
ness, the disease, the leprosy, poverty, and 
death, all away from us, there is no one else 
needed. I am ready to say to him, "Blessed 
L,ord, I do not want any other; thou art He 
that should come. I do not need any other." 



The Coming One 67 

We have to believe that way, or we have to 
believe that all things are going from bad to 
worse. I do not know what your conviction is; 
I do not care, brethren, what your ideas of the 
literal resurrection are; but when I go out into 
this graveyard and stand there beside the holy 
dead, if an angel were to come down from 
heaven and say to me that no one would come 
— my heart would break, and so would yours. 

Yes, we have to believe in some one to come. 
I cannot think of human history; I cannot see 
human experience about me as I see it every 
day; I cannot look at a scene like that we all 
witnessed yesterday — that old mother looking 
on the cold face of her husband, and her son; I 
cannot see families that have consecrated them- 
selves around me breaking up, and live, without 
hope in Him who is to come. If I thought no 
one is to come, in all the eternal ages, my heart 
would break and I should perish. And I rejoice 
that in the Book I am told some one will come, 
and it is added, "I am He that was, and is, and 
is to come." He is among us to-day. 

That is the way our Bible talks to us, and 
enables us to live; enables the heart to beat on 
and have a future before us all bright and glori- 
ous. I am ready to say, standing as I do near the 
end of my life, and reading the promise in this 
Old Book, "Come, Iyord Jesus, come quickly!" 



68 The Witness of Jesus 

Thou art He that should come, and we still 
await Thy coming. 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

I think we can realize this morning, as we 
look up to Christ and to our Father, through 
the emblems in their significance, how rich, 
how beautiful, how sweet they become to us as 
we say, "Art thou he that should come?" We 
want life; every breath, every aspiration and in- 
spiration of our souls, craves for life — life more 
abundant. And if you look at these emblems you 
see how infinitely wise has been the plan of life 
through the life of Jesus. You cannot look from 
the cross of Christ into the heart of the great liv- 
ing Father, week by week, without feeling the 
throb of that life and fellowship. In the faith 
of our hearts, let us feed to-day again in this 
fellowship — this life. L,et us be placed in full 
fellowship with God and Christ, and with the 
angels, and with all the holy dead. That is 
life. All the other words express it — joy, praise, 
blessedness, and we feel the means through 
which it comes to us. Let us thank God again 
for his blessings. 



The Coming One 69 

PRAYER. 

We thank Thee, O Father, that we can come 
before Thee again in the presence of these em- 
blems, consecrated by the lips of our L,ord Jesus 
Christ. Oh, we thank Thee that we are able 
to share in that blessed fellowship; we thank 
Thee for this institution that makes us partak- 
ers; this is the emblem of that life to us. Grant 
that in this life the soul may look up to Thee, 
with its eye clear and strong; with all its dis- 
ease and death taken away; and grant to-day 
that our joy may be full and strong as we go 
from this house of worship. Make it to us a 
blessing; purify our purposes and our aspira- 
tions, and bring us close to Thee! I^ead us 
through the remaining days of our pilgrimage 
here and bring us into Thy presence for which 
we are hoping — that presence in which there is 
fullness of joy forever more. And to Thy name 
be all the praise through Jesus Christ, now and 
forever! 



IV 

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF 

MAN 

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James and John 
his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain 
apart, and was transfigured before them: and his face did 
shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. — 
Matt. 17: i, 2. 

Whereunto ye do well that ye take heed as unto a lamp 
shining in a dark place, antil the day dawn, and the day- 
star arise in your hearts. — 2 Pet. 1: ig. 

In this language from Matthew we have a 
simple and^yet graphic description of one of the 
sublimest events in the life of the Son of Man. 
If we look for a reason why this event trans- 
pired, we may find it perhaps in the discouraged 
condition of the disciples in view of the Mas- 
ter's statement to them that He was to be 
crucified at Jerusalem. This statement seemed 
to them to be the death knell of all their hopes. 
How could their Master fulfill the national as- 
pirations of Israel and all the great prophecies 
concerning- the future if he must suffer an i^no- 
minious death? What profit would there be to 
them in following such a leader? What would 
be the outcome of all the struggle and conflict 
which were involved in being His disciples? 
Was it not to answer such questions as these 
that He said to His three representative follow- 
ers one day: "Come with me to the summit of 



The Transfiguration of Man yi 

yonder mountain, and there I will show you 
what manner of men you are to be when all my 
purposes have been accomplished in you." Not 
only did the transfiguration convince His disci- 
ples of the glory of Christ, but of the glory that 
awaited them in the resurrection state. 

This process of transfiguration is one which 
we see going on in nature about us. There is 
the small dark seed of a flower planted in the 
earth. Under the influence of soil, of shower 
and sunshine, it bursts its prison cell, opens its 
petals to the sunlight and becomes a thing of 
beauty and a joy. It has been transfigured. 
Look again at the ugly caterpillar crawling 
upon the earth. It is in the chrysalis state. 
Look again, and behold, it has been transfigured 
into a butterfly, whose beautiful wings reflect 
the glory of the sunlight as it flies through the 
air! It has been transfigured. The psalmist, 
looking out upon the earth, perhaps when 
spring had melted the ice and clothed the earth 
with beauty, exclaimed, "And the Lord re- 
newedst the face of the earth." We know 
how Spring can transform the barren earth, and 
clothe it with a thousand forms of life and 
beauty. 

Now this virtual transfiguration of the world 
is the physical effect of sunlight on the 
earth. It is this power that brings glory to 
that hidden and dormant seed and germ which 



72 The Witness of Jesus 

unfolds itself in the light of heaven. This is 
one of nature's parables, teaching us how God 
transforms men. The time was, not so far 
past, when there was no conception like this, 
strange as it may appear, natural as it 
seems to you to-day. The time was when 
everything was looked at mechanically, both in 
nature and elsewhere. We have here, then, 
simply an intimation of what I shall call the 
transfiguration of man. Jesus came into this 
world for that purpose: to bring to you, and to 
set into activity in the mind, all those forces 
which make for man's transfiguration. In this 
way, he made a change in the lives, the 
thoughts, the hearts of men. 

You have read of these great forces I have 
been talking about; you know that everywhere 
light is the symbol of truth; that warmth 
is the symbol of love. Everywhere in the uni- 
verse where men have lived at all, these forces 
are synonymous; and when we come to study 
the life of Christ, and to study men, you are 
just as apt to say light as truth. When you 
come to those things that affect the sensibilities 
of the heart, you are just as apt to say warmth 
as you are to say love. God has given the 
great symbol of his infinite speech in nature it- 
self. God has made parables all over the uni- 
verse, and we will never get to the end of 
them. He has made a solar system — itself a 



The Transfiguration of Man 73 

glorious and eternal parable of that great life 
that is to-day for humanity. The sunlight and 
the sun's warmth are for all life, for the service 
of man. Jesus is "the light of the world." He 
is also the out-raying of the love of God. He 
is the expression of that love. This life of the 
Son of God is the coming forth from the infin- 
ite Father of his light, just as much as the 
glory of the sun shines out there on the street. 
It is the sending forth of the light of the sun. 
And these activities that enter your souls to-day; 
that come out of warmth, gladness and rejoic- 
ing from the human heart, are instilled by the 
love of God, just as much as the glory of the 
expanding world is looking up with joy and 
gladness, hour by hour, because of the warmth 
and light that comes from the sun. It is this 
life of Jesus — this ideal, perfect life as it is 
shown to us — that produces these changes in 
man. And I think that the Scriptures teach 
us, if we study them, the same thought. 
The Apostle Paul uses the same word that is 
applied to the transfiguration of Jesus: ''Breth- 
ren, be ye not conformed to this world, but be 
ye transfigured" — the same word used in the 
record of the transfiguration of Jesus — "be ye 
transfigured." He wants all men transfigured. 
He wants changes to go on in the souls and 
lives of men that will make as much difference 
in their appearance, in their beauty, in their 



74 The Witness of Jesus 

glory and character, as have been made in the 
flower and the seed, from the mere root in the 
earth. "Be ye transfigured." And we are 
told just how that is to be — "By the renewing 
of your minds" — through the law that comes 
down from heaven, in the form of truth of Jesus 
Christ, shining into the mind and making that 
mind new, so that it follows out new concep- 
tions of God in the situations of life, new con- 
ceptions of manhood, and new conceptions of 
the possibilities of what a man can be hereafter, 
filling him with the love of God and the infin- 
ite glories of eternal truth. "We," he says, 
"would transfigure your mind, with the light 
of heaven shining into it, just like the spring- 
time, when the soil is sown, the light falls on 
it, and transfiguration begins." And so the 
Apostle — this same apostle — in the third chap- 
ter of Second Corinthians, makes that contrast, 
so bold in its masculine originality, between 
the Old Testament glory which has passed 
away, and the new modern glory that remains 
and excels. These he contrasts, and says, 
"Moses, which put a vail over his face, that 
the children of Israel could not steadfastly look 
to the end of that which is abolished." They 
had to look at the letter. But now he says, 
"With open face and without a vail we are gaz- 
ing into the face of Jesus of Nazareth, and by 
looking we are transfigured." This is a very 



The Transfiguration of Man 75 

significant statement. Thus gazing into the 
face of that Sun of Righteousness, in its truth 
and everlasting love, we are "transfigured from 
one degree of glory to another — just like a 
plant in the sun, as we watch it every day — 
from glory to* glory, even as by the spirit of the 
Lord." He explains that in a splendid con- 
trast immediately afterwards, when he says: 
"For God, who commanded the light to shine 
out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to 
give the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God in the face of Jesus Christ." Here is the 
process — the transfiguration of men — and when 
the Lord Jesus Christ came into this world this 
was the object of his deeds and of his teach- 
ing, — that which he wrought in" the world and 
that which he said to it. 

Now, what has been left recorded of these 
marvelous statements of words and deeds was 
intended to have just that effect on the souls 
and lives of men. These make a man shine in 
the diviner life, make the heart throb with a 
more glorious and Godlike palpitation. And 
the Scriptures teach us that this is the great 
and supreme good, not only of this but of every 
life of which the L,ord Jesus Christ has left a 
record. I read the opening verses of the first 
chaper of the second of Peter; it is simply a 
look at that same great fact. He starts to tell 
the people that we now have with us "all 



j6 The Witness of Jesus 

things that pertain to life" — sunlight and 
warmth — but, he says: "Whereby are given to 
us exceeding great and precious promises; that 
by these ye might be partakers of the divine 
nature," which is the likeness He gives to you. 
He has given to us all things that pertain to 
the life and likeness of God, to fill the mind 
with its truth and to fill the heart with love — 
everything capable of helping us become par- 
takers of the divine life. Because you have a 
share of the divine nature, you need a high at- 
tainment of life like that to make you more and 
more, day by day, year by year, larger and 
larger, a partaker of the divine nature, until 
you look like that. The Apostle clearly shows 
that he has reference to this same fact before 
he goes much further, and this practical lesson 
he gives to the brethren to whom he is writ- 
ing: "We have not been following cunningly 
devised fables;" we are not entertaining or 
charming the imagination of the human soul 
in its songs through the ages. So many of the 
old nations were following something like that. 
"We remember a scene that occurred in the 
history of our lives. We were eye-witnesses of 
his majesty. There came a voice to him from 
the excellent glory: 'This is my beloved Son, 
in whom I am well pleased;' and this voice 
which came from heaven we heard, when we 
were with him in the holy mount." 



The Transfiguration of Man 77 

The old idea of church life, thank God, is 
dropping away from us. The idea was once in 
so many sermons to which I have listened in 
my boyhood, that nearly everything we have 
here is simply a test; that God gives us so many 
tests of loyalty and fidelity to Himself; that we 
have a church to which we go every Sunday; 
that we have these things given to us to try us; 
to see how faithful we can be. The apostle 
says it is not that at all. It is something He 
has spoken to us, if we hear him. I conceive 
it to be the result of listening. It will be the 
result of opening the ear of the soul and allow- 
ing to enter it these words of the apostle. 
When Jesus was on the mount it is said that 
his face was shining and the sun was dimmed; 
the celestial beings gathered around and talked 
with him about the great message that Christ 
should bear to men — his love for the world; his 
decease, — how it should be accomplished at 
Jerusalem. That voice came down from heav- 
en and said, "Hear ye him!" These men were 
sent abroad into the world to teach, and were 
given authority, and the hearing of this teach- 
ing would make men look like that. The 
transfiguration scene tells me that the man who 
opens the ear of the soul and listens to the 
words of the Son of God, receives the light that 
shines' from the face of the infinite Father, re- 
flected from the face of the Son of God, in his 



yS The Witness of Jesus 

heart, and responds to it, shall look like that; 
that is what we hear him for. And the Apos- 
tle says, "We heard him a long time ago, and 
we have been listening; and we are looking to 
that time when men shall become more and 
more partakers of the divine nature, and be like 
that themselves." 

The lesson I want to leave in your mind is, 
that this Christian life, the Christian service 
or worship of God; this looking of the soul on 
these high planes of life and activity of service, 
will cause the day to dawn and the day star to 
arise in your hearts. There is nothing like 
that morning scene here referred to that I 
know of in all nature, and nature is greater 
than all these artifices. He says, "Brethren, 
there is a shining disc below there, somewhere, 
and the light is coming up, and the day is 
dawning, and the stars of beauty are seen no 
more." That is, the man that listens and be- 
lieves, who loves this truth, this life, is living 
here at the dawning of a glorious life. If you 
sit there, and look long enough, you see the 
whole space filled with glory. In a little while, 
as the sun shows its shining face, it will trans- 
figure the whole sky. Some day, and some 
time of the day as you gaze upon it, it will 
shine in your heart like that, not over the hills 
or over the mountains, but in your heart. In 
a time like that the mind will receive light. 



The Transfiguration of Man 79 

The apostle was gazing at the face of Jesus on 
that mountain, and the Divine nature that was 
in that body of Jesus burst out, so he could 
look at it. Now, he says, when the great day 
dawns in your soul, the kindling of this mass 
of love, the result will be that over the whole 
being will burst forth a change — a transfigura- 
tion — the transfiguration of humanity. 

I do not wonder that the apostle said, u L,ord, 
it is good for us to be here — here in a life like 
this, in converse with the great spirits of the 
fathers. It is good to be here; let us stay 
here." And brethren, it is good to be in the 
presence of a vision like that. He told them 
it was a vision, after they came down from the 
mountain. They were taken by the hands and 
led up to the great transfiguration of humanity, 
when not one person but all redeemed shall see 
that day dawning, and the soul burst into the 
glorious sunlight of God's truth and of God's 
light, — made like God, shining there on that 
mountain. And to lead humanity up to the top 
of the great mountain of the transfiguration of 
our nature, is what we learn from the scene. 



FOREKNOWLEDGE AND PREDES- 
TINATION 

"For whom he did foreknow he also did predestinate, to 
be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the 
first-born among many brethren. Moreover, whom he did 
predestinate them he also called; and whom he called, 
them he also justified; and whom he justified them he also 
glorified." — Rom. 8:28, 2g. 

I have often said to you — and it comes into 
my mind this morning, in treating on a subject 
like this, — that I wish we could forget all the 
theological controversies of the past. Of course 
this is impossible, but the wish grows intense 
with me. I want to look at this subject on its 
merits, as it presents itself to me; as I under- 
stand it in the teachings of this book. It is 
not often that these apostolic records take us 
up to the mountain tops, and permit us to take 
a general survey of what they conceive to be 
the great plan of God in the management of 
this world and of the races that live on it. They 
were so occupied, as you will readily see by 
reading the epistles, with the practical things 
of this life, that they seldom ventured to such 
heights. Visions were rising continually out 
of the form of that old civilization which ex- 
isted before Christianity came, from pagan 
80 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 81 

superstitions and Jewish prejudices, that even 
the early Christians were, on that account, 
going around making mistakes and blunders. 
And nearly all of these letters of the apostle are 
occupied in trying to set them right — correct- 
ing these errors. But occasionally we are led 
up on the top of the mountain, and get some 
glimpse of a vast plan, according to which all 
things are being conducted in this world. 

Now if we go and stand under the great 
bridge which spans the Mississippi at St. Iyouis, 
and contemplate its bases, its arches, pillars 
and complex structure, we will be impressed 
with the greatness of the thought that conceived 
it. The reflection comes to us, that this was once 
a thought, that the whole thing existed as a 
thought in the mind of a man, before a stone was 
laid. And if we could remain there, and had 
architectural knowledge sufficient to under- 
stand the relation of one part to another, we 
could get the whole thing in our minds; we 
could realize that thought; and so with every- 
thing else. The dimensions and proportions of 
St. Peter's, in Rome, were first thoughts in the 
mind of Michael Angelo, although it took 
many years after his death to make them visi- 
ible; but these were his thoughts. And so, 
when we take up the whole length and breadth 
of modern knowledge, in its widest extent, not 

only the solar system, but all the systems, not 
6 



82 The Witness of Jesus 

only our world, but all the worlds, we have 
simply a thought that was in the mind of God; 
once a thought which afterwards become vis- 
ible to the eye of man and to the eyes of angels. 
And now we are studying it, to see if we can 
take in the thought and the work of the great 
Builder. 

This text which I have read to you this morn- 
ing, as I conceive it, is an attempt in the mind 
of the greatest thinker among the apostles, to 
take in the vision, and see if he could hold in 
his mind the thought of the Christian system 
as it was before its development in the history 
and experience of men. "Whom he foreknew 
he did also predestinate, to be conformed to the 
image of his Son." We are met with difficul- 
ties in our minds whenever we undertake to 
grapple with words like these, and the thought 
that they contain. If we think of a being that 
is infinite, that is Omnipresent, we know that 
there can be no such thing as foreknowledge 
to him. There can be foreknowledge to a 
being whose life is made up of yesterday, to- 
day and to-morrow, of this year and the next, 
but to a Being who is a spirit and has no rela- 
tion to time or place whatever, who has no 
no past and no future, there can be no past 
and no future. An infinite Being — how can 
there be foreknowledge to Him? We have 
to make God like one of ourselves, and his life 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 83 

to be like ours, to attribute foreknowledge to 
Him. But be bas no past. He bas no future. 
His life is infinite and eternal. To God tbere 
can be no foreknowledge. The word is an 
adaptation to human finiteness. What God 
knew eternally, and knows at present to all 
eternity, was made known, and my life being 
made up of these few moments, these things 
having been known before I was born, to me 
it is foreknowledge, not to Him. And we are 
compelled, therefore, to take the phrase and by 
the very necessities almost of our mental struc- 
ture and of our relation with the universe, in 
order to make it intelligible to us, to attribute 
our thought in some measure to Him. And 
that is the reason why it is placed in this man- 
ner before us. The deepest thought perhaps 
in the human mind is this question of predes- 
tination and foreknowledge. Now, all great 
forms of thought are liable to misapplication. 
Our fathers, when they got hold of some vast 
question of human thought, made mistakes in 
applying it. We can account for these mistakes 
and for the mistakes men have made in all di- 
rections, when we consider the thought itself. 
One hears a great deal said about predestina- 
tion and foreknowledge — not in the church, for 
that has passed away from the church — but the 
scientists have taken it up and Calvinism now 
gets its tremendous blows from the realms of 



84 The Witness of Jesus 

science. In their account which they give to 
themselves of the structure of the material uni- 
verse they are brought face to face often with 
that thought. Yet it is rooted and stands there 
in the human mind, and may stand there for- 
ever as part of our experience, part of our 
thinking, part of our nature, from which we 
cannot escape. When you have a conception 
of the universe, as we see it is planned, there is 
a thought behind it, and that is, that it is 
God's way — the thought of the great God. We 
cannot escape these words — foreknowledge, 
predestination. It was marked out before we 
saw it; before we were born; existing always. 
The application of that thought to the universe 
is where that controversy comes in. But I am 
not going to discuss the controversy; it is not 
at all a matter in which I am interested to-day. 
I wish to call your attention simply to what I 
conceive to be the meaning of this great 
thought in the mind of the apostle. 

In the physical world as well as in the hu- 
man, in all nature outside of ourselves, there is 
foreknowledge and predestination. I mentioned 
to you recently — and now we have the same 
thought along another line — that the modern 
conception of the manner in which the mate- 
rial universe has come to us is entirely differ- 
ent from that which was in existence when we 
were young. We have not given ourselves 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 85 

time enough, we have not given the world 
time enough, nor room enough, for the play of 
these vast forces and the processes needed. We 
now know that. We have seen the whole 
thing as originating suddenly; six or seven 
thousand years was not required; the fiat was 
given, and the world grew as we see it. Now, 
there is no educated man thinks that. I am 
not going to take up this controversy about 
Moses at all, I am looking at the fact, and I 
tell you that no educated man believes any 
more that this universe was created instanta- 
neously, as we see it now, or in a few thousand 
years. What is called the nebular hypothesis is 
almost as universally accepted as the knowl- 
edge of the law of gravitation, a conception 
that you are perfectly familiar with. I need 
not go over that except as an introduction to 
the thought I want to give you. All these 
planets in our solar system, beginning at Nep- 
tune and going one by one to Mars, are con- 
ceived of as having been originally one body of 
incandescent gas in the universe, and, being 
acted upon by the same laws that we see acting 
now, the simple process of cooling began, a 
ring breaking off as it would shrink, turning 
over in space, and left there to solidify into a 
world. We thus have a world given to us that 
we know. In our system, as far as we can see, 
Neptune was first, and then, I believe, Saturn; 



86 The Witness of Jesus 

after these had cooled down a distance apart, 
Venus; and when it had cooled down, at a dis- 
tance, Jupiter, another ring; and so on down to 
Mars and the earth between us and the sun still, 
leaving the sun as it was, with its original heat 
and light still there. We can see the universe 
coming to us that way. But to reach that con- 
ception it has taken ages and ages, during 
which we were ignorant. Now the thought 
that I want to call your attention to is, that 
when this whole space was filled with this vast 
body of nebulous cloud, when it began to move, 
when these forces were at work, as Mark Hop- 
kins says so very beautifully in one of his 
pictures, gravitation, cohesion and chemical 
affinity would begin, and just what we see, 
world after world, ring after ring, broken off 
from this vast circumference, began to cool 
down, and form; there was a plan. When it 
had gathered together in a body, rotating on 
its axis and going around in its orbit, and cool- 
ing down; there was something meant. The 
Author that planned it had in the first place 
thought of its inhabitants; it was meant to be 
the home of man. The body of a man as we 
see it and as it lives here in the world was that 
to which the whole thing looked, when it had 
cooled down and the structures of rock had 
formed. These have been broken up and 
ground into soil, and vegetation, plants and 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 87 

animals began to come. Then we begin to see 
the thought. If we had lived in this space it- 
self we would never have had a conception of 
it. After awhile we began to see, as one after 
another was created, the prophecy that is speak- 
ing out of the process, according to which the 
great light and thought of God are continuing 
this whole process. 

We are told — not going into details at all — 
that the first vertebrated animal, the oldest 
one of which we know, was a fish, with its 
spinal column parallel to the earth's axis. 
There, is an enlargement at the end of the spinal 
column; we have fins; and we have the form at 
the end — the fins — the lower limbs, the rudi- 
mentary nerves, a system, and from these the 
production of a perfect animal of some class. If 
we study man's life and body, his structure, we 
know that he is simply a vertebrated animal; 
the first one of which there is a type in that fish. 
Then we come to the reptilia. Agassiz and 
Darwin tell us that only a little more is nature 
specialized, and they are making a sloping 
angle with the earth's axis. Then a form 
having a little more specialized features, then 
one after the other, more and more specialized, 
to the birds, making each a little larger angle 
from the earth's axis. Then came the mam- 
mals, each making a large angle; and after 
awhile, man, at right angles. You have gone 



88 The Witness of Jesus 

through this in your text books at school, and 
you know you cannot have anything more than 
a right angle; beyond that you are going down 
again. So these men concluded, from the very 
fact that man stands at right angles to the 
earth's axis, that he is the last of the series; 
there can never be any more. The thought in 
my mind is this: somebody knew, marked it 
out beforehand, predestinated, that the world 
should be formed as we have it through these 
millions of years; and that it should be a suit- 
able home after awhile for a perfect vertebrated 
animal — man's body. If you look just at the 
structure of man's body in its relation to the 
world, that seems to be its past history. We are 
told by Mr. Darwin that all these living things 
started from a few germs, and they have come 
regularly according to the order and simple 
method of God's working. Somehow my mind 
is so constructed that I have to think that God 
has a method to work by, because I know He 
has an infinite mind. I do not know how to 
conceive of a mind working without a method; 
and when I think of an infinite mind I must 
think of a perfect method. And when I study 
the laws of the universe and its tenantry I see 
something — not all of it — of the method that 
mind has followed, spreading out before me 
like this vast spectacle of nature. That has 
produced foreknowledge, so far as a man's body 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 89 

is concerned. It has produced foreknowledge 
in nature, and if we study nature and find out 
its laws, we study the infinite mind anew, what 
its plan was and the method by which it was 
working. 

But I want to call your attention to some- 
thing else in connection with the race, which 
is not merely the placing of the body at right 
angles to the earth's axis. These laws are as 
to its bodily life. But there is in the Bible, 
and according to our consciousness, another 
state. God has not only made the body of a 
man out of this earth — that we know by the 
chemist's crucible — but there is something in 
it which came from Him. There is something 
in it that thinks. There is a vast spiritual 
life. We have only time to glance at that a 
little. Now we have a race — the begin- 
ning of a race, and that race that was fore- 
known, and planned out beforehand, who 
should have ownership and dominion on this 
planet, when it was perfected by these vast 
processes to which I have called attention. But 
here we are met again with theologies which 
have hindered our thinking. We start with a 
race at the top. We invert the whole order 
that we see controlling everywhere else in na- 
ture, and make the race perfect at the begin- 
ning. We think of Adam as the finest 
specimen of humanity that ever stood here; 



90 The Witness of Jesus 

that God built him up, something like the 
artist would build up a statue, to his own ideal 
of a perfect man, then breathed into his nostrils 
the perfect life, and then took charge of him 
personally, and conducted him up to all he 
knew. And then we have the theory of going 
down from that day by willful transgression, 
falling, falling, from that day to this. That is 
our theology. But it is neither history, ex- 
perience nor observation, and we have to go by 
what we know; by what we are conscious of. 
We know the history of this race on this plan- 
et, and we know that it begins very low down 
in nature, and works up. Go where you will, 
in any civilization, and look below and you will 
find a lower order. The observation of the 
world, the teaching of history, show progress, 
evolution, growth. I know that in this vast 
system of humanity the current of civilization 
has been onward, and it has never stopped. 
But you ask me, "Do you not believe in the 
fall of man?" I tell you, No; not in the sense 
in which it is stated in our theology. I believe 
in the falling of man. On this planet every 
man does his own falling. No one man falls for 
another man. If I do that which is wrong, I 
fall. It is not possible for me to live from boy- 
hood to manhood without doing that any more 
than it is possible for a child in its infancy to 
walk without falling and hurting itself a grest 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 91 

many times. But for the race to have begun 
perfect, that is contrary to all history, and to the 
observation and knowledge of mankind. I con- 
ceive that it was impossible. I go with the apos- 
tle back to the time when that race starts. 
There was a plan in the mind of the infinite 
Father of it, what it should be, just as there 
was in His mind a plan for this whole solar sys- 
tem when it was gaseous. There was a baby 
race — what man was physically, I do not know 
— but mentally he was simply a baby race, and 
the race started out to grow and advance. That 
is the history of it as you have it in the Bible. 
Like the history of any other race, you have a 
long period of infancy; we call it the patriarch- 
al age. It was too young to have law. How 
far do you read down from the beginning of the 
Bible until the laws given on Mount Sinai! 
Now Darwin has shown, and all the other sci- 
entists, that this is a universal law in nature; 
that the same states that you have in the indi- 
vidual of any race or species you will find in 
the history of the species as a whole. If the 
individual have birth and infancy, childhood 
and maturity, you go back and study the 
race, and it will have its infancy and manhood, 
but much longer than that of the individual. 
That is the principle scientists give us every- 
where, and we have just that in regard to the 
human race. We look back into the region 



92 The Witness of Jesus 

that is almost nebulous to us, beyond the time 
when it was said, "Do this or that," — in the 
childhood of humanity. We have all that in 
the Bible. And then we have, after the boy- 
hood is passed, a time when God could say to 
him, because, he could understand, "Do not 
have anybody but me to worship; do not make 
any image. Remember this day to keep it 
holy. Have right thought and feeling to your 
father and mother. Do not take what belongs 
to another." There are the simplest rules that 
can possibly be imagined in that decalogue; yet 
they are the very elements of all life and mo- 
rality — the first things that a child learns 
everywhere, whether read in the Bible or not. 
When your infancy is passed, when the time 
comes when you are old enough to understand, 
and your mother says, "Do this," or "Do that," 
you come to Mount Sinai. And then you pass 
through this education, this trying and leading 
up. You are being trained, taught, developed 
and the mind is schooled in the things you must 
do and the things you must not do — the "thou 
shalts" and the "thou shalt nots." For a long 
period, as we read here in the history of the 
race, beginning in infancy, it was passing 
through its minority, till after awhile, when it 
had been trained enough, the apostle tells us, it 
had come to the time of its majority. And then 
comes the great Teacher and puts us under 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 93 

another order of things entirely. The whole 
thing is still a plan in the mind of God, and in 
a man's experience. You need these tutors and 
governors in boyhood, but now, he says, that is 
behind us, and we are treated as men. God is 
not saying to us now, "Thoushalt," and "Thou 
shalt not." If you were to say to that boy, 
when he is twenty-one years old, "Do this, or 
I will punish you;" "Do that and I will reward 
you," it would degrade him. You cannot do 
that, because he is a man now. But what you 
can do to him now is to lay before his mind the 
great principles of conduct, and say to him: 
"Here is industry, honesty and virtue and self- 
respect and, at the end, the self-respect of your 
fellowmen, a large reward; live here and work 
that out." You can also say to him: "On the 
other hand there is idleness and vice, profligacy 
and the pursuit of pleasure alone; at the end of 
it there is poverty and the lack of self-respect, 
of the friendship of your fellowmen, and of hap- 
piness. That is all." And you have got to 
leave him alone, face to face with destiny, to 
work it out, using all the influences that you 
can consistently, now that he is a man. When 
this Teacher came to the world he said, "The 
time for boyhood is gone; the law is over." He 
lays before us the great principles of life, so 
that we can look at them, believe in and em- 
brace them, and carry them out in our lives 



94 The Witness of Jesus 

and obtain the reward in the future. He that 
believes not, and rejects these principles and 
goes on his way, at the end will receive punish- 
ment. 

But Paul looks further. He goes back with 
us and says, "Whom he foreknew he did pre- 
destinate, to be in the image of the mind of the 
Father. Let us study that a little. Look iuto 
your own experience. You have playing about 
your feet an infant. You have already in your 
mind an image to which you intend to bring 
him. You have an idea. You feed him and 
nurse him and keep disease away, and after 
awhile train him in "thou shalt" and "thou 
shalt not," develop his moral and mental na- 
ture; raise up his stature; make him just six 
feet high, if you can, and build up his charac- 
ter as high as you can, to the ideal to which 
you intend to raise him. The apostle says that 
is just what is in God's mind as to the character 
you are to have — the image to which this babe 
should grow; for "whom he foreknew he did 
also predestinate" to be conformed to the im- 
age. Then what was in his mind? What 
image is that? This is the thought; it is only 
the first intimation of the thought that I can 
give you in a subject as large as this. The ideal 
man of God is Christ. The babe of the race is 
Adam. The race began in infancy; it ends 
in the glorious, perfected ideal. And theapos- 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 95 

tie tells us that, as He leads us up to these 
heights aud bids us look back to the time when 
the plan was in its infancy, conceived by the 
infinite Father; and onward to the time when 
that plan will be worked out for this race, and 
that when it is educated and built up, it will 
be the image of his Son. * It is a divine ideal 
of perfect manhood of the infinite Father when 
the first child was made and put here in the 
world. That is the predestination; that is the 
foreknowledge. We have endeavored to reason 
ourselves out of that; but when we reason our- 
selves out of history and out of experience, we 
will get rid of this predestination and fore- 
knowledge; and not before. 

But there are some other thoughts that con- 
nect themselves with this at this point, that 
may appear somewhat difficult to understand. 
You may say, "What have I to do with it? If 
God has planned it, then his purposes and 
plans can never break down and fail, and He 
has seen me since my creation, and every other 
member of the race; and in case He raises them 
all up to that ideal, there can be no failure." 
The Universalists, on the one side, believe that 
we are just what we ought to be, and God will 
fix it all satisfactorily. Then the extreme Cal- 
vinist says, "They that are going to listen to 
this, whom God had in his mind, will get 
there." That is the way they battled about 



96 The Witness of Jesus 

this thing. You do not teach your children 
that way, but you have predestination and fore- 
knowledge for them, like God. When your 
child is born and becomes a little boy or girl, 
you do not say, "Well, I have a plan; I have 
made this plan and it shall not fail." But 
plans often do fail. But to make the analogy 
complete we will assume that you will just let 
him grow; you need not take care of him, or 
preach to him, just leave it to the infant, and 
predestination and foreknowledge will fix the 
whole thing! We do not do that way. Not 
at all. We feel responsible for all that goes 
into that mind. We superintend it and we 
plant everything there that we can, and it will 
take all the life, toil and care and training of 
those parents to bring him up. And then we 
shall fail unless we get it to be his thought. 
You know perfectly well that if that child ever 
reaches the ideal in your mind it must think 
for itself. Your thought cannot make him 
a man ; your plan cannot make him ; your 
foreknowledge and predestination cannot make 
him. It can give him an opportunity to be a 
man. All this is vain if you cannot have him 
think for himself; if you cannot have his mind 
work itself; if you cannot have his character 
build itself; if you cannot have him build it 
as he goes, your foreknowledge and predestina- 
tion will not make him a man at all. This is 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 97 

the way we raise children in the world and this 
is the way God is doing with us. 

Where do we plant the seed in the early 
springtime? In the ground for these beautiful 
plants and flowers. We do not see it. Nature 
will take charge of it — the law of God. L,et it 
alone? No. You keep the weeds and insects 
and all destructive influences away, and you 
will have the rose, the verbena and everything 
else. If it is going to drink in the life; if it is 
going to paint itself with all the splendid 
shades of sunlight; if it is going to look up to 
the Father and smile with beauty snatched 
from the sun and skies, it is going to take your 
care, your watchfulness. Predestination did 
not overcome that; it offered the opportunity 
for man. So it is the apostle would lay these 
facts before us. Then he says to us, "You be- 
lieve, you obey, you grow." And after a while 
you reach the ideal. But what is the ideal? 
The ideal, in God's mind, of a man, is Christ 
Jesus. He is God's plan. Listen to what the 
apostle says — and all this whole statement har- 
monizes with it: "Whom he did foreknow he 
predestinated" — that is, he planned — "to be 
conformed to the image of his Son." In the 
mind of the great Father everyone is recog- 
nized, like the first image of his mind. So he 
tells us, when the whole system is wrought 
out, when the race has grown up, he will 



98 The Witness of Jesus 

simply be the "firstborn among his brethren.'' 
This is Paul's conception in regard to it. 
Then he gives us his reason: "Whom he had 
predestinated, he called." That is the reason 
he has sent this man with that great message of 
life, light and truth, calling on all the world; 
and when men were called, heard that word 
and believed it, they testified. And they grow 
to that image, until they are separated from 
sin and the love of sin, into the righteousness 
and the love and character of God; yet in the 
mind of the infinite Father justified man is 
growing up in the light of his plan. You have 
the gospel of Christ calling to you; you have 
the faith in the Son of God on the ground that 
you are justified now, and in the lives of just 
men you are glorified. The law of love and 
truth shining all about their lives, these men 
were ascending to the glorious ideal, which lay 
in the great mind of the great God. And He 
is calling all, after a while, to that goodly 
company, and when they are all gathered 
home; when they are all complete; when they 
have graduated through this school of God, the 
infinite Father, then our destiny surpasses any 
conception we are able to form. "We do not 
know," says one of the inspired men, "what 
we shall be." But we know this: we know 
that it is part of the plan of infinite love, in- 
finite law, infinite wisdom, that we are to be 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 99 

"like him." That is the plan. This fore- 
knowledge, predestination — not theology — but 
that plan in the mind of the great God that 
you have seen working throughout the world, 
through nature, through history, through 
plants and animals, is now working along the 
line of the human race, and God is holding be- 
fore you still the eternal ideal. When you get 
there you will be glorified, the brightest in 
nature and the brightest in history, according 
to God's plan. But we cannot be glorified, we 
cannot shine with the light breaking from 
within ourselves without being just and obedi- 
ent, without culture and growth. Do not think 
of it now as an ideal merely; think of it in con- 
nection with yourself; think of it in connec- 
tion with your life. Along the line I am trav- 
eling, brethren, I can see how it could be said 
that He, the glorious One, is simply "the first- 
born among all these brethren." In that light, 
in that character, in that place, among that 
assemblage, in that position, in their happi- 
ness, in their glory, the glory of the universe, 
he is simply the "firstborn among many." 

LofC. 



ioo The Witness of Jesus 

REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

There is a great principle in our nature 
that underlies this part of our worship. We 
lose much if we think that all these com- 
mands are arbitrary, to see if we be faithful 
one with another. That is very shallow think- 
ing. They are placed by the eternal laws, 
every one of them. You know it is a law of 
the universe that men grow into the likeness of 
what they love and admire. We have whole 
nations illustrating that fact. Mars was the 
supreme god honored by the Romans; every 
man became a soldier. When the heroic gods 
were worshiped, by the Greeks they became 
heroic and almost demi-gods, and nations which 
have worshiped, like the people of India, with 
great theologies and misconceptions, you see 
where they grow to. It is the same principle you 
see in that window there; the plant, so long as 
it looks up to the sun, takes its color, breathes 
its breath. If a man looks at this ideal life he 
will look like it. He has provided this feast, 
that we, week by week, may behold that spec- 
tacle of infinite and everlasting love in the 
cross of Jesus; to look at it goes to the very 
center of the soul. See how it glorifies and 
beautifies the whole universe, as you see it in 
Christ, reveal the infinite mind of the Father. 
And he wants us to look as often as we can, to 



Foreknowledge and Predestination 101 

have our heart drawn with all the force in 
it toward that glorious image so that we may 
be like him. Some day the real fellowship 
will begin and then these symbols will not be 
there. The fellowship of heaven, the com- 
munion of the saints of God in light above, is 
here in type. Let us look at him through 
these symbols and some day we will see him 
and be like him. Let us thank God for this 
privilege. 



VI 
SALVATION AND RETRIBUTION 

If the word spoken by angels was steadfast and every 
transgression and disobedience received a just recompense 
of reward, how shall we escape, if we neglect so great sal- 
vation. — Heb. 2:3. 

"How shall we escape if we neglect so great 
salvation?" I will occupy the time this morn- 
ing in calling your attention to this old text. 
The only way that I can preach a new sermon 
to you is to preach it from an old text. A 
great many sermons that I have preached in 
my life have gotten too old to be preached 
again, and I have tried to preach all the new 
ones I can. But the texts are old. I suppose 
there is scarcely a verse in the New Testament 
that has a sermon in it that I have not preached 
for you in the thirty or more years that we 
have been here together; and still these old 
questions of Christianity get larger and larger 
and newer to me year by year. I have been 
watching myself as closely as I could, and when 
the truth begins to get old, when sermons, and 
subjects and visions of truth get old to me, I 
quit. No man has any right to preach unless 
the Bible is eternally bringing up to his 
thoughts new things, new conceptions of old 

things, the widening of views which he had 

102 



Salvation and Retribution 103 

before. And when it ceases to do that for me, 
I know that my mission is over. 

Now we can scarcely select any theme, that, 
so far as hearing is concerned, would be more 
trite than this word "salvation." And yet, 
there is not a theme in the whole New Testa- 
ment about which there has been so great a 
change of thought, in the last fifteen or twenty 
years, as about this. The general conception 
which preachers and people had of salvation 
twenty years ago has not become untrue, but 
the point from which we view it has been al- 
tered; the point from which we look at it now 
has changed; and it has become a newer and 
larger thing, a much richer and grander thing 
than it was then. I think perhaps that it has 
practically led us to looking at every side of the 
question of retribution. A quarter or half a 
century ago we had a mechanical way of look- 
ing at this matter. The idea that we had, or 
that great numbers of men had, was that hell 
was below our feet — a vast, roaring cavern, 
with burning brimstone and flames; and that 
salvation meant to escape from all that. Some 
of us are old enough to go back in our lives to 
the time when that was effective; when it was 
sufficient to alarm and stir the hearts of men; 
and the talk about salvation was to think 
of getting away from that pit, or we would 
fall into it. And salvation then was consid- 



104 The Witness of Jesus 

ered as passing through a sort of process, a 
church process. And we were to believe this 
first, and that next, and that next; and when 
we got to the third point, we were saved! That 
was the idea of salvation — just a mere process. 
Each of the great churches in the world was 
equally sincere as far as this saving process is 
concerned, and they believe it yet. We have a 
certain consensus of doctrine which we must 
look at, and be ready to sign it, and, believing 
it, we do certain things; when we do these 
things we have complied with all the doctrines 
as required of us, and therefore w T e are saved. 
There is yet a good deal of this mechanical 
view of salvation in the world, but we are get- 
ting more real now, yet not altogether. Sav- 
ing people in our time has become a profession. 
We have professional soul-savers, evangelists, 
they are called. They will bring in sinners, 
and work for you at sixty-five dollars a week, 
and guarantee a. hundred souls saved! And 
they devote themselves during their whole life- 
time to just that business. That is too me- 
chanical and professional to suit me. Maybe I 
am too old-fogy in my notions to understand it. 
And we have a good many of these professional 
soul-savers now. 

It is a very easy and mechanical way to do 
business. Take a man with some imagination 
and some emotion, some religious feeling. He 



Salvation and Retribution 105 

sits down and thinks up all the touching inci- 
dents that he has heard or read about. He 
stirs the people's feelings and excites them very 
much. He requires just a little knowledge of 
Christianity, not much. He goes into a com- 
munity and gets an audience of a thousand peo- 
ple, works them up, and when they go through 
the process they are all saved. He calls them 
saved people. 

But the idea of salvation to me is a much 
larger one than that, and I think that the 
masses of the people are growing more and 
more into it. We have in a good many places 
in the New Testament a process indicated very 
clearly, of what salvation is; what a man is 
saved from, if he is saved at all, and the de- 
gree to which he is saved, and the degree 
to which he is not saved. Now, I recognize 
the fact, as fully as anyone, that when you go 
to the world to have it take on Christianity, to 
have it become Christian, the first requisite is, 
to induce men to turn around and give them- 
selves up to Christ; as we say, obey the gospel. 
We have a good many phrases by which we 
express it — the process of having these people 
saved — in a very narrow or rudimentary sense; 
in an introductory sense, and that is all. To 
be saved, in our view, is a vaster thing than 
that now. The apostle says that under the old 
dispensation "every transgression and disobe- 



106 The Witness of Jesus 

dience received its just recompense of reward.' ' 
He might have said, that is true under all dis- 
pensations. The moral laws of this universe 
do not change; the ways of applying them may 
change, do change, but what is morally right 
now will be morally right forever. What is 
right in one world will be right in another 
world; and what is wrong in another world in 
the eyes of God will be wrong in this. God has 
shaped and formed the moral universe as he 
has the natural one; that when you do wrong 
you violate a moral law; and the law asserts it- 
self and says, "you cannot escape." You may 
think you escape; we all think we escape when 
we have done wrong and committed sin, as we 
say, but we simply deceive ourselves. If God 
lives, if He carries on this universe by a 
changeless great process, there is no wrong a 
man does at all, of which this will not be true; 
it will receive its just recompense of reward. 
And the consequences of wrong doing will just 
as certainly come as any effect in the universe 
of God follows its natural cause. We know 
that. It is not a mechanical thing at all. The 
condition in which a man is placed is an effect 
— not something created by law. It is an effect 
of great moral causes, issuing in the passions 
and appetites, and in the consciousness and the 
thought and habit, producing effects on the 
soul. 



Salvation and Retribution 107 

We are talking not now so much about hav- 
ing a bookkeeper in heaven. We used to have 
an idea that God had a bookkeeper, an angel, 
who watched every man, and when he made a 
misstep he put it down, and if he did a good 
act he put that down; that he had a book con- 
taining a record of our thoughts, feelings, good 
and bad; that he had a court, and brought you 
up there, showed you the book, and counted 
up one side and then the other, and every man 
received according to his deeds done in the 
body at that time. This was perhaps the best 
thing men could think in those days. It may 
be the best thing for a great many men now to 
think — a mechanical conception that we derive 
from our conduct. But when we think of God 
as a vast, infinite, omnipresent spirit, always 
about and in you, we cannot think of a court- 
house, throne of judgment, a book and book- 
keeper. He has so shaped the nature of man 
that he is a kind of self-registering machine. I 
have heard of self-registering things. A car- 
riage is made with a self-registering apparatus 
that puts down every mile traveled; when you 
get to the end of the journey, it has the record. 
We are imitating God when we do that. He 
has made man's life that way. He keeps a 
record in your conscience, memory, heart, of 
all your life, thought and action. This soul of 
man is self- registering. The book is the heart, 



108 The Witness of Jesus 

the conscience, the moral nature of man, and 
when you do wrong you hurt that. When a 
man does wrong he hurts himself; he distorts 
his own nature; he dwarfs his own soul. He 
puts it out of his power to become what he 
would have been if he had never done that. 
We have that kind of a nature, and we are be- 
ginning to see that now; and what we want is 
deliverance from the condition into which man 
brings himself when he has carried that self- 
register until it has become an alarm to the 
eyes of his own conscience. If he can be woke 
up to see it, we want him to stop hurting him- 
self, to give attention to that side of his life that 
will help him out of this condition. The com- 
ing of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world is 
God's great power to show a man that, to re- 
veal himself, to make him know his own soul, 
and to win him to all the love, beauty and 
power God has, and away from the other selfish 
life. This is what God wants. It is said in 
this book, that Jesus Christ and the gospel is 
the power of God to save men. And I do not 
think He has any other power for that purpose. 
He has omnipotence to create worlds. He has 
omnipotence to manage worlds according to 
law and method. But to build man up, to de- 
liver him from himself, from the condition in 
which he has placed himself, from the state in 
which he finds himself, to save man, all the 



Salvation and Retribution 109 

power of God is in Christ. He does not save 
man by mechanical force at all. That would 
make Him a God of force, and man a machine. 

The idea of a good many is, that if we get 
along and do pretty much as we please, and 
indulge in what joy, pleasure, sensation and 
everything else we want to do in this world, 
just before we die, the eyes will be opened and 
we will see God, see right, see the universe in 
its true light; then we will look back on our 
life, see how bad that has been; and God by 
some great power, will turn us around and save 
us. Well, that is a mechanical conception of 
God as a God of force, and we are worshiping 
a God of truth. Now when you get out of the 
life of Jesus of Nazareth the truth and the 
moral power of that life, and the great spiritual 
force there is in it, and bring this power to 
bear upon the soul of man, if that does not save 
him, I do not know any other power in the uni- 
verse that can. 

Christ presents to us a better idea of God, a 
better idea of our relationship to him, a better 
knowledge of the truth, a better way of enjoy- 
ing, living and feeling, better aspirations, 
hopes and motives. He shows us all that is 
right; shows us that high pathway on which a 
man may walk and be a man; takes away from 
him that relationship to the world that sur- 
rounds and holds him. Man has a side for pas- 



no The Witness of Jesus 

sioti, for feeling, for the animal, and when he 
loves God these faculties tend to love and find 
enjoyment in the pursuit of Him. If not thus 
directed his life will be godless, and every god- 
less life is dwarfing itself, deforming itself, 
hurting itself; taking away its power for good, 
sympathy, enjoyment, while the man is living 
that way. What a man needs to be saved from, 
is himself. Ignorance is a fearful thing in the 
soul of a man. He wants to be saved from it — 
ignorance of God, of right, of truth, of all the 
applications of moral principles. We have met 
men — we often see them in that condition — 
who do wrong and do not know it. They can 
violate what we call the high obligations of 
gentlemen, and have no knowledge of it at all. 
You see the condition in which a man like that 
puts himself; you feel sorry for him and regret 
it. But the man does not know; he has no 
conception of just how he ought to act as it re- 
lates to the behavior of a high-toned, moral 
gentleman. Of course that is ignorance; if he 
were not ignorant you would take his conduct 
as an insult. Put yourself in that position and 
think of what God expects of man in his treat- 
ment of Him. Think of a man walking about 
on this planet insulting the infinite Creator, 
to whom he is under eternal obligation always 
to act in his true relationship, and not know 
it; insulting His glorious and infinite Fathei 



Salvation and Retribution in 

every day! If you tell him so tie is sur- 
prised. He didu't kuow anything of that. A 
man needs to be saved from that condition, to 
have his eyes opened. A man needs to have 
right conceptions given him of what character 
is — the character of God and his own character, 
to be placed in true relationship with salvation 
in its large sense. 

This thing of going through a form and hav- 
ing sins forgiven and starting, is in a very nar- 
row sense to be a Christian. To all men He 
says, Here are the great moral laws of the uni- 
verse of God, and the transgression of these, 
the leaping over God's law and commandments, 
which exist in all the relations which men sus- 
tain to one another in civil society and moral 
life, will surely result in self-destruction. He 
says that these work their own effect; they 
receive their just recompense of reward. And 
Christ has come to save us from this condition, 
to save a man from himself. 

Just take that one vice — selfishness; that 
sums up all the other sins, the crimes, the de- 
formities of the human soul. I think if there 
is one word that God would hate with all the 
infinite power of his own nature it is that word 
selfishness, each man living for his own gratifi- 
cation and interest. There is not a sin that 
humanity can be guilty of that cannot be cov- 
ered up under that word, selfishness. To save 



H2 The Witness of Jesus 

a man from himself — how can yon do it when 
his soul has become selfish, and always be- 
comes blind as it becomes selfish. It loves 
itself first and everything else in the universe 
next. How can you save him from that life? 
He may believe your doctrine to be just as true 
as if Gabriel announced it. He may make 
his confession like a saint and still be selfish. 
He is not saved from his selfishness. How can 
you save him? He has made some kind of a 
start, but it is not a thing to be done by a 
mechanical process. Salvation is too vast; it 
takes man his whole lifetime to gain it. The 
only way I know of is to show him the true 
life of Jesus. Ah, it is impossible for one to 
look on that life without seeing his sin, with- 
out seeing the God of infinite love. That life 
is a presentation of the very heart of the in- 
finite Father among selfish men. It unfolds 
itself here before the eyes of men on this earth, 
a life of absolute love that surpasses everything 
in this universe; and the only way to save 
us from our selfishness is just to show us Jiis 
love, and not only to show it to the eye of the 
senses, but, as the Apostle Paul says, to the 
eyes of the heart. The heart has eyes to see, 
to adore and to follow a life like that. You 
cannot save a man from his selfishness any 
other way. God presents a vast power — this 
infinite and eternal magnet — this life of Christ 



Salvation and Retribution 113 

Jesus — and you want to follow him through his 
life; see what he looks like; see what he is; 
willing to make sacrifices, not for his own com- 
fort or pleasure, not for his own convenience, 
wealth or interest, but for the good of man- 
kind. He desired to save these men wrapped 
up in the darkest pall of selfishness, misery and 
woe. He wanted them to open their eyes and 
see that infinite beauty; to bring them out by a 
life-long look at that eternal idea of unselfish- 
ness, of love, service and universal good. And 
when a man gives his heart to that, he only 
does the best he can; that is all any of us can 
do. Keep trying, keep looking, keep serving, 
getting a little way further and further from 
selfishness, nearer and nearer towards God, and 
to that world to which we are all sure to go. 
He proposes to save us that way, and no won- 
der he calls it a "great salvation." 

Ivook at the man whose evil habits have 
gained dominion over him. I was talking to 
one yesterday — a man who, without thinking 
about it, had become a drunkard. Little by 
little the habit grew as he indulged, until it had 
captured him. He is in its power now utterly. 
You cannot save him, just by talking to him. 
You have to give him life and character, some- 
thing that will impress on his will the true idea 
of manhood; that will wake him up. The 
trouble with sin is that it blinds the eyes that 



H4 The Witness of Jesus 

would look on it; so that we cannot form an 
estimate of its sinfulness. The more you sin 
in any direction the less you think that sin 
sinful. The more a man indulges a sinful 
course of life, the less wickedness he sees in it. 
It needs this power of God in the form of light, 
truth and love, the high life of this divine man, 
to lift men. This is what it means by the 
"great salvation;" this is what it means in 
human nature, as we see changes and experi- 
ences in ourselves; and then think of a man 
like Christ, of a man delivered from these hin- 
drances and obstructious and weights that he 
has put upon himself. All men have concep- 
tions of God, of Christ, of life, of the service 
that life is going to render to the universe; but 
think of the vast difference in the conception of 
a man ruled by selfishness, and of a man saved 
from himself! Saved from himself, not from 
some burning cavern down below. It is not 
some fearful place somewhere which some have 
pictured, with implements to throw you into 
the name. The trouble is, the mind of a man 
is the cavern; there is the serpent, there the 
deformity. And often the man comes down to 
the last part of his life, having made away with 
himself, and he starts out into the eternal world 
deformed, blinded, his capacity for happiness 
all gone. Think of that — a man living through 
this life, coming to the verge of the eternal 



Salvation and Retribution 115 

day, where lie is to live forever, and he has 
hampered himself and taken away the opportu- 
nity, destroyed his power of seeing, thinking 
and acting! He has destroyed his power of 
enjoyment. This is what we are doing; this is 
the evil. This is a belief as different from the 
old conception of hell as the two places are 
different from each other. If I had to drop 
into an abyss and some one take charge of me, 
and punish me, that is not much. But if I am 
to poison myself, disease myself, ruin myself, 
take away my eternal opportunities, and all my 
powers of enjoyment, seeing nothing, and lov- 
ing nothing in heaven, and the angels saying to 
me, "Thou art the man" — that is judgment. 
He is saying to us every day, in the lives of 
good men, and in this book, "Thou art the 
man!" He wants to save a man from that, and 
that is the reason why this salvation is very 
great. Why, it presents to us the whole world 
of life and the whole universe of love; and an 
eternity of activity and happiness; laying it 
there before the soul of man, asking that you 
love that, in contrast to this. It is the choice 
which we have to make. If God gives us the 
choice — the only beings we know of in the uni- 
verse that have it, — what a vast salvation this 
is, taking in the whole lifetime of man! The 
man closes his eyes on this world, with its 
evils, its sorrows, its diseases, its pains and 



n6 The Witness of Jesus 

toils and doubts, and opens them on what we 
conceive to be the fragrance, activity and hap- 
piness of eternity. That would be a salvation, 
but it is a salvation just in proportion as we 
prepare ourselves for it. Let us never forget 
that. That is what God wants us to do; that is 
what he asks us to do. He places us in the 
discipline of this world, and under these circum- 
stances of discipline and patience, self-denial, 
virtue, self-control, so that when we lie down 
and close the eyes upon the sun, moon and 
stars, that very instant we open them on the 
raptures of the world beyond. What a great 
salvation this is! It began to be spoken of by 
the Lord. It has been confirmed unto us by 
them that heard him; and by this word they 
are speaking yet; and those that hear him are 
coming with their message, day by day, all 
through their lifetime, with their suggestions 
everywheie, still speaking, still confirming. 
There is not a man in the world whose soul 
has been touched with this glorious, powerful 
vision, not a man who has said, "Get thee 
behind me, Satan," but knows and feels the 
truth of that real life that Jesus mapped out. 
And if there is needed a proof confirming 
this great salvation I have his own life be- 
fore me, the life of the Son of man. In 
addition, every man walking in self-control 
and righteousness is God's perpetual miracle 



Salvation and Retribution 117 

before the eyes of men, showing that this 
Gospel has power to save. It is still a 
wonder, and a marvelously great triumph 
in human nature — this saving men. Men are 
going out of this world all the time; we have 
seen them. They shut their eyes on the cares, " 
bereavements, troubles of this life, and open 
them in the realms of infinite and eternal light. 
They are doing that all the time; and the 
apostle says, that is salvation. How shall we 
escape if we neglect it? There is a word that 
covers the whole matter. If we neglect this; 
if we do not take the opportunity; do not pay 
attention to these delicate sensibilities God has 
given in the heart; do not feel any concern 
about these great principles of right that unfold 
themselves — how can we escape? It is a most 
marvelous word, yet you have been told it a 
thousand times. You need not do anything 
violent. To destroy your property you need 
not take fire and burn your house; it will go to 
pieces if you let it alone. You need not burn 
up your farm; let it alone, neglect it, and see 
what then becomes of it. In your moral and 
spiritual character no great vice or crime need 
come in to destroy it. Just let it alone. Shut 
the eyes of faith and of the vigilant conscience, 
the readiness to hear God talk. Refuse to 
notice those divine influences that are brought 
to us day by day. That will suffice. Neglect 



n8 The Witness of Jesus 

does the fatal work. If I answer this great 
question, How shall we escape if we neglect so 
great salvation? I will say, there is no escape. 



. REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

God our Father knows us and he knows all 
our tendencies and our dangers. He has just 
the kindness and tenderness of the parent, only 
he is infinite and we are finite. He knows 
the little weaknesses and dangers of his chil- 
dren. He sees that we are in great danger of 
neglecting our opportunities; and this is the 
reason he holds before us himself; this is why 
he holds that divine life before us in this ordi- 
nance. He wants us to see it, think of it. 
We think we know better than he does; like all 
children we think we know better than the 
parent. We think we can omit this service and 
drop it out; that it will not affect us. But God 
knows best. He says, there is the great dan- 
ger of the human soul; and I want to hold be- 
fore your eyes always, if possible, this unselfish 
life of love — the love of Jesus Christ. That is 
what this institution is to celebrate. It is to 
bring that whole life before us in these sym- 
bols. It is part of the great process of salva- 
tion, to save us from neglect and save us from 
vice. Let us thank God for his goodness. 



VII 

THE THREE WORLDS OF REVE- 
LATION 

For unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the 
world to come, whereof we speak. — Heb. 2:5. 

There are two or three words in our Greek 
New Testament translated by the English word 
" world." I shall call your attention to-day to 
the concept that I have formed of the use of 
this word. I dislike very much to refer to 
the original Greek, for of all places in the 
world the pulpit is the most improper for any- 
thing like pedantry. But we are not able to 
give the conception which we have without 
mentioning the Greek words which are ren- 
dered "world." The English reader of the 
New Testament would not get the distinction 
which is made clearly between the uses of this 
term, and yet there is a vast distinction in the 
fundamental thought at the bottom of these 
words which is ever confounded. Not that I 
believe there is any talismanic power in words. 
In religion we ought to study meanings rather 
than words, just as we do in nature. Words 
are of value only as they express our concep- 
tions of things. I know that since the Refor- 
mation there has been a discussion about the 
119 



120 The Witness of Jesus 

Bible, growing out of an idea which still reigns 
largely over the human mind, that there must 
be infallibility somewhere for man; and in that 
controversy infallibility has fixed itself on the 
words of the Bible, and that has been really 
followed by a mechanical theory of inspiration, 
which has given us several hundred years of the 
study of words. I suppose it has had its value; 
I know it has done vast harm in enslaving the 
human mind to words. The mind ought never 
to be enslaved to any word, only to thought. 

Now there are three worlds for man; and 
there are three words used to designate these 
worlds. Moreover, these three words are used 
to distinguish the three relations that men sus- 
tain to the vast order of things that are called 
worlds. I am not quarreling with those who 
do not so translate them. I do not know that 
there is any better word than "world." If I 
had to translate them now I would hardly know 
any better word than has been here given. We 
have the word cosmos, which is almost an 
English word. Our word, cosmographical, 
used every day, is an adjective derived from, 
and used in the sense in which the Greek 
word is used. This meaning is used oftener 
than the other two, and there are not many 
words in the entire New Testament that have 
more varieties of meaning than this word cos- 
mos. It has particular reference to the world 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 121 

we live in, the world about us. The idea is 
so large that it is vague and most difficult to 
form a conception in regard to it. But the 
Greeks were very accurate as far as their 
knowledge went, and they were very acute 
observers of this universe about them. They 
had discovered a beautiful order in the great 
processes of nature. They had watched the 
procession of the stars, the coming and going of 
the seasons, and they had seen about them all 
the order of nature — a vast and glorious beauty. 
They were worshipers of beauty, and they used 
a word that has both ideas in it — cosmos — the 
idea of beauty and of order, for they belong to 
each other. There is one use of it in the New 
Testament which is as good an illustration as 
any I can give you. The Apostle Peter, in his 
directions to the Christian women in regard to 
a thought which he was very anxious to im- 
press upon them, said: u L,et your adornment" — 
speaking of their apparel — "be not of gold, sil- 
ver, braided hair" and all that, "but a meek and 
quiet spirit which in the sight of God is beyond 
price." Another interpretation by those who 
lean towards paganism makes it a prohibition 
of adornment; but there is nothing of that sort 
meant. The one was affirmative, the other 
negative. The apostle had in mind the articles 
that go to make up a beautiful dress, the ap- 
parel of Christian women. He takes it and 



122 The Witness of Jesus 

arranges it in an order that gives the finest pic- 
ture and he uses this word cosmos to express 
the order and the beauty. There is beauty in 
it, but he says let the finality of the apparel be 
moral beauty; let that be the supreme thing. 
This will be a good illustration of the elemen- 
tary concept of the thought in this word cos- 
mos. It has a very large application in the 
New Testament. It looks always at man in his 
relation to this cosmos. If you take a Greek 
concordance and look at the usage of the term, 
you will see that the real man is always looked 
at in relation to the world; he lives in all of 
those things that are necessary to his life here. 
It is all comprehended in the different uses of 
this term, whether it be in the process by 
which he gets his living out of it, or in the or- 
ganizations, political or religious, that he 
forms. It is all expressed because it has order 
and beauty. There are two or three hundred 
usages of it looking in that direction, but this 
will suffice. The very word itself will express 
to your own thought, even in English, its va- 
ried meaning. I want directly to call your at- 
tention to your own life as it relates to the 
world that is represented by the word cosmos. 
We then have another word which is used 
nearly as often. Its meaning is rendered by the 
English word world in nearly all of its uses, 
and that word is aion, of which we all know the 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 123 

meaning. We cannot separate the use of this 
word from the idea of time. But in reading 
along through the English, you would not 
notice any distinction, unless you had the 
Greek interpretation before you; but whenever 
it occurs it gives the idea of time. It contains 
also the idea of the population, the human race, 
its activities, the variations of its life and civil- 
ization. It tells all of this as it relates to the 
centuries, to the ages, to time. We needed this 
word, we need it now. We look at the earth, 
the stars, the rivers and seas, they are ex- 
pressed all in one term — cosmos — the world. 
When we gather up in our thought, which we 
have to do, the procession of the ages and what 
they have brought to us, or what we have 
now — the summing up of all the time that has 
gone, we have in our thoughts the industries, 
the pursuits, the achievements of the men that 
have lived on this planet, in the different de- 
partments of human art and excellence, and we 
say world, and we mean the world of men, as 
they have come down through the ages, and we 
use the word aion in that sense. 

But we have another word which is used 
in a different sense from either of these; it is 
the Greek word oikoumena. It is a participle 
from a noun, which means house — dwelling 
place; and the Greek verb is oikeo — to dwell 
in that house; and the participle used as a 



124 The Witness of Jesus 

noun means a dwelling — an habitation. And 
we needed that word also. I want you to feel 
that this New Testament is not a narrow thing; 
it is wide. It knows of all these worlds that 
man's life needs, and I want to speak of them 
directly in that relation. To give you an illus- 
tration of your own life: You come into this 
world as a place where you work and think, 
move about and unfold your activities; and all 
that you do in your pursuits, in your occu- 
pation, in your profession, are your efforts to 
have relation to cosmos, the world. You live 
on and work on; but if you live your three score 
years and ten, you are looking forward to what 
you can accumulate. You look at this year 
and the next year and make your calculations; 
and when you get to three score years and ten 
you look back at your activities and energies 
all along through your aion or age. You have 
been trying to make yourself a home, a place 
to live, to gather the means of living, so that 
when old age comes you have a habitation. So 
that when you look at the passing away of the 
years of all your lifetime, there is another view 
of life from that when you look at the attain- 
ments, the achievements, what you have ac- 
complished. The dwelling that you enjoy — 
that is your world — your oikoumena. We have 
it in every life, and this is the view which the 
Bible takes in a large sense, in the sense of the 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 125 

race, the world. He lives in the world — cos- 
mos; the centuries, the ages, through which he 
has been going are the world — aion; the home 
to which he is going is the world, oikoumena. 
Your coming into this world, your activity in 
the field, in the business houses — all these 
efforts have an object, a purpose — gain; take 
that out and they mean nothing. 

Now, then, if you take the New Testament 
you will see that it was the first book that 
was ever made that gives us any just con- 
ception of man at all; and we have no ade- 
quate conception of a human being outside of 
that view that is given to us in the unfolding 
that is illustrated in this book. I do not 
think I am speaking in an exaggerated way at 
all. I know there were great minds and great 
men, mighty spirits, before we had the New 
Testament, and before we had very much of 
the Old Testament. I know they had no ade- 
quate conceptions of a man in these relations 
in which he comes to live, and how to live with 
reference to a final dwelling. I think there is 
no worthy conception at all outside of what we 
get here. Now, then, if we ask ourselves — for 
this is the question that comes before us — what 
is man? what is he in relation to these worlds, 
to this world, cosmos? — of course it would take 
a very long time to give even a fraction of his 
activities, as it relates to the cosmos. Man is 



126 The Witness of Jesus 

very great if he had only this one world. And 
suppose he just had this; still he is great, be- 
cause he has builded up vast structures of life 
that relate simply to the cosmos. His civiliza- 
tion, whatever that may mean, his institutions, 
his government, his empire, his studies, and all 
those processes of life — he is very great in all 
these. When we talk about him as a vast 
builder, or talk about him as we see him achiev- 
ing these great things, in the whole amplifica- 
tion of the life he lives, man is very great, 
simply as a cosmographical being, but that is 
all. He is not greater than the beaver and 
simply follows the beaver. Give him a cosmos, 
he is a builder, a constructor, an architect; he 
is a workman; he has built ships, and cities, 
roads, commerce, government and homes. He 
is a vast builder; he is only a cosmos; that is all. 
Now the reason why we have to have some 
other world, great as he is in relation to cosmos, 
is because that does not satisfy him. He has 
other sides to his nature above these; he has 
needs that he perceives that go beyond that. 
And not only so; but when he sees, when he 
considers what others have done, and what he 
can accomplish, what he can enjoy, what he 
can experience in connection with the cosmo- 
graphical world, there is in his nature even 
that which would fly above and beyond it. We 
would not diminish the value or the greatness 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 127 

of the human intellect — of its force, of its re- 
sources in relation to this world; this is very 
great. Still if he has that, simply, he is mere- 
ly a beaver. He is in that class of animals that 
build — a builder simply. But a man has more 
than that; he has not only the cosmographical 
world in which he lives, which he modifies, in 
which he works, which he enjoys, which he pos- 
sesses in a temporary way, but he» has the aion 
and the oikoumena. It is a very common phrase 
now to say of man, he is the heir of all the ages. 
We can say it in a general way of our civiliza- 
tion and the time in which we live. We are lit- 
erally the heirs of all the ages, of the men who 
lived in the years as far back as we know about 
man at all. Each age has gathered out of the 
universe what it was able to collect, and has 
transferred it to the next, and that to the next; 
so that we have the results of the human mind 
and of what the human hand could achieve in 
the ages that are gone, summed up now in our 
civilization. We want a word that will express 
it, and that word is koumena — the world. We 
have the ages, the world of history — aion; the 
era of science — cosmos. Aion — the world of 
history, is the world which gathers up out of 
cosmos, puts it on record and transfers it to the 
next age, and that to the next. And so we 
have looked back and taken into the eye of the 
mind our concept of the vast multitudes that 



128 The 'Witness of Jesus 

have lived here in their activities, and feel that 
they have handed down to us this heritage. 
This word aion — the time-world — occurs a 
great many times in this book. Then we have, 
as I have given you an illustration, the other 
word, to be looked at in regard to the race, 
oikoumena. And this brings us to the great 
question of this whole consideration. Out of 
the processes of commerce, out of the flow and 
movements of the ages in their accumulation, 
over everything, has the simple purpose been to 
bring man up, to grow him up to five or six 
feet high, to feed and clothe him with all the 
improved processes; to make a transfer to an- 
other age, and let that work on and improve 
him still, and go on, age after age, forever? 
This is the question. There are some great 
minds in each age. I think they are not very 
numerous in this, but the age remembers, and 
I am still speaking of the two worlds in this 
reference, cosmos and aion. In this way we 
have what is called now in philosophy the wor- 
ship of humanity. It is believed in this view 
that men, by the use of all that God has put in 
the whole cosmic world, in the enjoyment of all 
that comes to them out of the procession of the 
ages, are lifting up humanity, making man 
something greater, something higher, more re- 
fined, more cultivated; giving him more power; 
and all they can see, as they look down the 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 129 

everlasting ages, is the unfolding and perfecting 
of humanity. And they tell us that the wor- 
ship after all is humanity — a perfected human- 
ity. Well, that would be much if we had just 
these two worlds. A man having simply these 
two worlds has got to look at them; that is the 
only hope he has. But that does not satisfy. 
Why, then, he would be just like the trees of 
the forest. They grow up and when they fruc- 
tify and hybridize, they blossom, and another 
race of trees begins to grow; these die, the indi- 
viduals perish. We have the same thing in our 
fruits. You can raise a race of peach trees, make 
them hybridize and blossom and you raise bet- 
ter peaches; but the old ones are all gone; 
better ones are raised; and these raise some 
better still. They pass away; the individuals 
perish. So we are told when we look at the 
botanical world that nature has a supreme re- 
gard for the race but cares nothing for the in- 
dividual. The individuals all go, like the 
leaves dropping from the trees; and the trees 
themselves go, but nature has improved them, 
and this goes on and on forever. 

That is the conception that we have when we 
look simply at man and his relation to the two 
worlds, cosmos and aion. But we then have 
another world to which man is related and it is 
referred to in my text — "unto the angels hath 
he not put in subjection the world to come 



130 The Witness of Jesus 

whereof we speak." This is brought about by 
a view which the writer has been taking al- 
ready of man. He said, looking at the aion, 
"God, who in times past" — in those old ages — 
"spoke to the fathers by the prophets, hath in 
these last days spoken unto us by his Son, by 
whom he made the worlds " It is aion, with 
reference to that life when the ages were set in 
order. It is a word there in Greek for the pur- 
pose of making the Greek scholar know what 
aion means — to arrange, to set in order the 
centuries as they have relation to each other. 
In the past all these races of men have been 
looking at one life. Jewish angelology was at 
that time a vast institution. Not only did God 
employ the natural agencies such as fire, light- 
ning, the wind, as his angels, but spiritual be- 
ings designated angels, or messengers, were 
active agents in all the Jewish economy. The 
law was given through ranks of angels, and all 
the processes in the cosmos were carried on by 
angelic agencies. Now, he sa)^s, they may 
indeed do something in the process of the 
world; they may indeed mediate as heretofore 
in the centuries in the affairs of men, but there 
is a world which He hath not subjected to 
them; there is a world which belongs to man. 
In its formation the great Framer was making a 
home for another being, not angels. Hence 
he says, "To the angels he has not put in sub- 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 131 

jection" — the world to come, to which we are 
going, oikoumena ; not cosmos, not aion; it is 
the home. It is a dwelling place. 

You see what view we have in this book 
of human life. If we had all that science has 
or ever will achieve in its knowledge, in its do- 
minion, in its usage or cosmical force; if we had 
the full possession of all that has been trans- 
mitted to us by history, and then if we have 
all that man shall have when he is grown rich 
in thought, in heart, in life, in power, as he 
has traveled down through the ages, the place 
he would wish above all, would be a home to 
live in, a dwelling. And this is the concep- 
tion which the New Testament gives us of man. 
I am anxious that we shall not think of it as a 
book that has no knowledge, although it has 
indeed the limitations of the knowledge of the 
men who made it. One of the things that makes 
it such a divine book to me is, that if you study 
these men who have reported these things to 
us, you can see the limitations of their knowl- 
edge. They did not know what we do; they 
spoke of the world as they knew it. They spoke 
of history as they knew it, and they knew very 
little about it. They left us a book in which is 
pointed out the earth and the heavens and the 
whole map of the Father, and they say, There 
is man. This is the reason why that question 
of marvel and of wonder came up in the heart 



132 The Witness of Jesus 

of the writer, and lie gathers it from the psalm- 
ist; not merely as a builder, not merely as a 
transient passenger through the ages, but 
having a home, a dwelling place; a place to 
stay, to live and enjoy all the achievements of 
the race. We have that also — as a world. And 
that is the world plainly brought out in this 
text — "the world whereof we speak." 

Now, then, we have time just to look at this 
effect in the coming of Christ. Immediately 
following this bold view of man and the uni- 
verse, that has been brought to his vision; he 
asks the question, "What is man?" "Thou 
madest him a little lower than the angels." 
The Jewish conception was that the space be- 
tween man and God was filled up by ranks of 
these creations, and man's place was below. 
But he goes back to the beginning of the record 
and he looks at them coming from God; and he 
finds that some day there shall be another man; 
that man should be above them all. God has 
"put all things under his feet;" and when the 
psalmist wrote that he had in his mind the 
words in Genesis, where it is said, when God 
formed man, "Let them have dominion." But 
the writer says that has not been accomplished 
yet, in cosmos, nor in the aion. Man is there 
still under a great many things; all things are 
not under him. That means in the human 
heart that shadow that falls upon it as it looks 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 133 

at the past and the future and excludes this 
higher idea of Christ. He says, we do not see 
it yet; one generation of men comes and goes 
and then another, with the same joy, the same 
sorrow, the same toil, with a little more wealth, 
a little more refinement, enjoyment, a little 
more independence, but they come and go the 
same. We see the green turf cover this earth, 
lying over the forms of the generations that have 
gone; all things are not under him yet. But 
we see that other world; we have some glimpse 
of this last world, where we see Jesus placing 
himself with men and living with them — the 
one form for which the ages were set in order. 
We see him, a little lower than the angels, and 
if we continue to look, we see Him "crowned 
with glory and honor," and this not for him- 
self, not merely for his own attainments, but it 
was for every man. The individual survives. 
We are not like the trees that all perish that 
better trees may come, and these die that other 
and better may succeed. But, he says, every 
man is going to live; every man is interested 
in the unfolding of the world as he has come 
and shown it to us. He "tasted death for every 
man." 

And this brings us lastly to the conception I 
want you to have to-day. It will make us 
think more of God, more of the vast design of 
the infinite Father, more of this book that un- 



134 The Witness of Jesus 

folds to us his plan; it will give us a higher 
conception of ourselves, of our life, of our des- 
tiny. If you look at man in his relation to the 
world, where God has placed him, does not this 
harmonize with the experience of mankind? 
Do not reason and the intuitions of the heart of 
every man harmonize with this glorious view 
brought by the Christ? Why should there be 
a cosmos? Why should there be barbarian 
populations to fill it? Why should there be 
ages to come one after another, if there is no- 
where to go, if there is not a place to stop, if 
there is not a home to dwell in? Why should 
there be any change? Why should there be 
hope? Why should there be these expectations 
of the human heart, as we look up at the stars 
under which we are working and see men pass- 
ing away from us? If all these things are to 
move on forever and forever, and I am to arrive 
nowhere, have no dwelling place, and there is 
to be no estate for me where I can inherit what 
the ages have accumulated, what doth it all 
profit? The Bible does not stop with the two 
worlds. It gives us the heirship of eternity. 
Thus we understand the world's Savior. We see 
him among men; we hear him talk with men; 
we see him passing away. He is now in the in- 
finite presence of the everlasting Father and con- 
ceived of by the mind as at the right hand of the 
Father. That is the world of the future; the one 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 135 

to be inherited, to be inhabited, possessed, owned 
and enjoyed by man. The writer's conception 
is, that the angels are not high enough; the 
angels are not divine enough, not great enough 
to own a world like that. What is man? He 
is the inhabitant, the owner; he is the posses- 
sor of this great world; that world, inhabited 
and owned by man's brother. He said, "these 
are my brethren; I am not ashamed to call 
them so." High as he is, some day they will 
be with him: some day in the intelligence of 
the sons of light they will dwell together — some 
day, when there is no longer time, no longer 
days, no longer cosmos for man. There will be 
oikoumena; there will be the ownership; there 
will be the possession — of the eternal home. 
And this is man in relation to all these worlds, 
their making up, their processes, and his final 
destiny. 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

How these thoughts repeat their significance 
in the simplest things of our religion! Take 
away the conception of the great world given 
him and the people about him, the great future 
lying before him, and what will there be for 
man left? A mere nothing. There is no sig- 



136 The Witness of Jesus 

nificance in it at all. But let me speak of that 
house, of the years that await us; let me feel 
that relation to those who love God, the spirits 
who have fixed their eyes upon Jesus as he goes 
above this world, above all this cosmos, this 
aion; let me feel that I am in fellowship with 
that life, with Him and with the Father; aud 
let me read its significance in this simple duty 
— then how rich it makes me! And that is 
what it means to us to-day. We realize, as we 
think what man is, all the means that God em- 
ploys to lift him by his heart, his fellowship, 
his love, to all that is pure and good and right 
on earth and heaven; how he induces him to 
look up; how he places for him these simple 
emblems. Let us thank God for his goodness. 

PRAYER 

We thank Thee again, Thou great and glo- 
rious Giver of all good, that with these emblems 
we can once more think of Thy grace and love. 
We thank Thee that we are brought into asso- 
ciation and fellowship with the living and with 
the dead. Blessed be Thy great and eternal 
name! Here we feel Thy love that has come 
to us through the cross of Christ. Infinite Fa- 
ther, give us eyes to see Thy glory and Thy 
, goodness. Give us hearts to feel that it is Thy 
power that brings us into closer sympathy, into 
that life which comes to us in the Lord Jesus 
Christ. Fill our hearts more and more with 



The Three Worlds of Revelation 137 

that hope, the anchor of the soul, sure and 
steadfast. Go with us, we beseech Thee, in all 
our services here, and at last bring us into the 
light of Thy presence, into the fellowship of 
God, that liveth and endureth forever, and unto 
Thy name we give all the praise, through 
Jesus, now and forever. Amen! 



VIII 
THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION 

Tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that 
worketh evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Greek, for 
there is no respect of persons with God. — Rom. 2:9. 

The subject to which I would invite your at- 
tention this morning is The L,aw of Retribution. 
I have views on this question that are well de- 
fined, that I hold with perfect confidence. It 
may be that they are peculiar, in some measure, 
to myself; but I wish to present them to you 
this morning. There is no religious subject 
with which I am acquainted that has under- 
gone greater modifications in my day than 
this, and I look back to conceptions that were 
universally entertained, universally and devout- 
ly believed, which are no longer held by think- 
ing and intelligent men. I see the immense 
change that has been brought about by that 
great movement of modern thought which is 
in the air. We cannot escape it. It is one of 
the wonders of the generation in which we 
have lived. I will not take time to remind you 
of the crudeness, I had almost said the black- 
ness, of the conceptions men had on the ques- 
tion of future retribution a generation ago. I 
remember when the man who had a sermon 

138 



The Law of Retribution 139 

that he dramatized on the judgment, who could 
make pictures, or copy them from Dante and 
Milton, that would freeze the blood in the veins 
of the people, make them shriek and cry out, 
was considered one of the great preachers of 
that day. Now you can hear a good deal of 
preaching in all the ordinary ministrations, and 
you hear nothing of that sort. It has fallen 
away from the minds of men, along with many 
superstitions that have come down to us from 
the past among the traditions which we have 
inherited from the old days. 

Since men have looked at the universe as 
being carried forward according to the law 
of causation — cause and effect — this central 
thought that has changed all the others — a 
great change has been brought about. The 
difference between the management of the 
world by miracles, interpretation breaking out 
here and there either from writings of the Al- 
mighty, or from angels or dreams, and the 
orderly procedure of all things according to 
that vast, infinite, universal law of what we 
call cause and effect — the law of causation — is 
deep and wide. It has come to us from a study 
of nature, as our couception of the forces of 
nature has widened and heightened. We have 
not got to the end, for it is infinite, but we per- 
ceive that law to reign wherever the eye of man 
or the mind of man can reach or see. There 



140 The Witness of Jesus 

comes up, then, faith in the human heart which 
is universal and fixes that conviction in the 
human mind. It is in me. It has changed all 
my conceptions of a hundred things in the uni- 
verse, both in the world of nature and the 
world of mind, in the world of science and in 
the world of religion. And if it is not brok- 
en, all things move according to the plan in 
the mind of the infinite God. He has shown 
us that in this great law that underlies tempta- 
tion. The whole concept that men have in 
regard to questions like this brings up before us 
the great problem of suffering on earth. The 
phenomena upon which we look, in the midst 
of which we live, through which our experi- 
ence has been, is largely a problem of suffering. 
It is one that has occupied .human thoughts 
since there have been human thoughts; it is one 
that will occupy human thought while human 
thought remains. Why men suffer all kinds of 
suffering — physical, mental, moral — why men 
suffer in this universe at all, how it came here, 
what it is here for — this has been the vast prob- 
lem that has covered the human soul with 
darkness to the grave. I shall state it in this 
way: that suffering and sin are to each other as 
cause and effect; not simply by the arbitrary 
appointment of somebody in the universe. It 
is the appointment of the Creator of the uni- 
verse when he made it and fixed it under that 



The Law of Retribution 141 

law — that while men sin they will suffer be- 
cause they sin; that while men are pure and 
holy they will be happy, in this world or in 
other worlds, because these laws are universal 
laws and have no exception. Now I have not 
time to argue that, but just simply to state it; 
but it needs a modification. I do not mean 
that all suffering in this world is the result of 
sin — the effect of sin. I do not believe that a 
vast amount of human suffering is the effect of 
sin at all. I am just as well convinced of that 
as I am of any position that I hold in my relig- 
ious faith. And I may just as well say it this 
time as to leave it to be said hereafter, and I 
may just as well say it as anybody else. You 
will see that the emancipation of this whole 
subject eliminates from religious thought what 
I conceive to be the superstition of Christen- 
dom — that is, the existence of a vast Satanic 
power nearly equal to that of God himself, go- 
ing about in the universe doing all this. I 
look at that as one of the darkest superstitions 
that the human mind can possibly hold. I 
shall not hesitate to state that I do not believe 
in the personal existence of Satan at all. I do 
not need any such thing in my, faith. I can 
account for all the physical and mental suffer- 
ing on this planet that I have ever heard or 
read of without the existence of any such be- 
ing. We need the use of the word sometimes 



142 The Witness of Jesus 

— we need it constantly to sum up — to give us 
an idea of the sum of evil — that vast force that 
is opposed to the happiness of men on earth, 
and this fact originated that word. It will take 
more time than I have this morning to give 
you my conception, my reasons and my under- 
standing of this whole question about a per- 
sonal Satan, but it is necessary for me to tell 
you that this conception I am going to give 
you about retribution and suffering to-day, ig- 
nores that whole subject; eliminates it from my 
mind. As long as I try to account for the phe- 
nomenon of human suffering in this world with 
Satan in it, it confuses the whole problem of 
nature, and brings the entire problem of human 
history, with its phenomena, into everlasting 
contradiction. Besides, it leaves a stain on 
the character of the living God that ought 
not to be permitted to remain. I know the 
whole conception, and I will take time enough 
to show it. That conception is that God per- 
mitted Satan to come to our world and take 
His children, who have had no experience, and 
pervert them and depress them and get posses- 
sion of them, and that he is keeping them — 
that is, the majority of them — from that time 
on. You will see it in all the old books on 
theology, that God permits it. Well, now, if I 
permit an evil that I can prevent, I am guilty 
of the effects of that evil. If I see a man about 



The Law of Retribution 143 

to take your life, and I can easily prevent it, 
and do not do so, I am guilty of your death. I 
cannot think of God as guilty, absolutely guilty, 
of crime, by permitting it. 

I give you this picture: Not long ago in a 
discussion with some preachers, one of them 
said he had a doubt about that. I said to him, 
''Here is a girl, your daughter, and you have 
raised her, educated her, loved her. She is in- 
nocent, pure, beautiful. She sees life lying 
out before her like a dream of happiness and 
joy. And here is an accomplished scoundrel 
that is handsome. He has powers that are in- 
conceivably vaster than hers; he is educated 
and accomplished. He can accomplish his pur- 
pose, and he means to seduce and ruin her. 
You say, 'I know she is innocent; but she has 
not exhibited any moral strength, and I would 
not take that man and introduce him and place 
her under his power, but I will permit it, just 
to see how she will do!' What would you think 
of yourself?" And you take the human race 
in its innocence and purity, in its inexperience, 
in its weakness, and then think of a being 
whose, power in our conception is omnipresent, 
all over this planet, and next to God, being 
turned loose to destroy men's souls — who will 
say what he can do with innocent humanity if 
permitted? How can you think of the charac- 
ter of God that way? And of this inexperience 



144 The Witness of Jesus 

one step further, and I will stop. This inex- 
perience leads to mistakes and to wrong. One 
wrong leads to another, until after awhile, 
wrong having been done, the great law of 
causation must have its sway; suffering must 
come. In other words, punishment must come 
to these children. They have done wrong, 
been misled, gone astray. They must be pun- 
ished. Suppose they are my children and I 
say, "I cannot punish them myself; I will send 
one of them to Jefferson City, and I will hunt 
over this planet and find a man who is the most 
malignant, the most selfish, that has the most 
power; I will select him to punish that little 
child because she has gone astray!" I have not 
described the baseness or the malignity of Sa- 
tan in punishing the children that are turned 
over to him. But I cannot entertain that 
kind of theology; I do not believe it at all. 
It has dropped away from my mind long ago. 
Now I have this explanation to make further. 
I have said that suffering is the effect of sin. 
There are two kinds of suffering — animal and 
mental suffering. When I do something which 
I believe is wrong, which I know to be wrong, 
I suffer. Every man in the world suffers, who 
does wrong, and that suffering is the keenest 
and the deepest that the heart knows. That is 
penalty. But when I am born into this world 
there is sensibility. The cold atmosphere wilJ 



The Law of Retribution 145 

affect my sensibilities to a degree of painfull- 
ness. That is not because I have sinned. When 
I am born into this world I have to get my liv- 
ing with my hands, and provide for the support 
of my family. I pass through an atmosphere 
that is full of microbes and germs, inhale them 
and go home and suffer. That is not because I 
or anybody else have sinned. It is the natural 
suffering; the disease that comes to us out of 
nature; out of its natural realities and .acci- 
dents. This is all about us. It is in all the 
ordinary pursuits of life, and it is not because 
anybody sinned. It was supposed once that it 
was because either the man himself or his an- 
cestors had sinned. It was a part of the plan 
of Christ that there should be suffering. One 
of the most benevolent of all the provisions in 
your physical organism, in your adaptation to 
the forces of the world around you, is the pos- 
sibility of suffering. You can see very readily 
that the possibility of suffering is what makes 
our civilization. The activities of the human 
brain and the human hand are put forth be- 
cause men will suffer if they do not put them 
forth. It is God's vast stimulant, or spur, to 
bring out the energies of that brain that he has 
created. That is the meaning of suffering. To 
show you that, read that first chapter of Genesis 
— the picture of the first man. He was a suf- 
ferer before he fell. I know the old idea was 



146 The Witness of Jesus 

that there was no suffering on this earth till 
man sinned. We know this is a mistake now. 
No sensible man among us thinks that now. 
You read that picture of Adam in the garden 
of Eden. God had created him like he has 
you, correlated to social life. And you take a 
man with a heart that is to reach out, that has 
something to live for, something to sympathize 
with, and that something is not good, and see 
what he will do. Everybody has read the story 
of Robinson Crusoe — which reveals a man just 
in that position on an island by himself. All 
society was gone; everybody was gone. He 
could say, "I am monarch of all I survey." 
But he closes by saying, after he has everything 
that he wants, "Better dwell in the midst of 
alarms, than reign in this horrible place." 
The heart has spoken. And you have just that 
same picture when you read this story of 
Adam. He looked at everything that had 
companionship around him and felt in himself 
that same intense, keen craving for companion- 
ship, and he went to the Creator and said, 
"They each have companionships, but me. I 
was made for it, and my heart is breaking for 
it, and there is no companionship for me." 
That is the picture that we have in the Bible; 
and he had not sinned at all. 

In the greatest book of the Old Testament, 
the book of Job, there is a poetic and sublime 



The Law of Retribution 147 

discussion of this vast problem of suffering. 
The author of it has just placed it in the midst 
of the forces around him, and argued it out in 
that way. Old Egypt was then as it is now; 
wherever you see suffering it is believed it is 
because somebody sinned. He takes the best 
man in the world; he makes God himself say, 
there is no one like him on earth. And 
then you see the natural forces just like these 
you see operating now. They are metaphor- 
ical, in the sense in which I use the word, but 
they are natural forces. The man with his 
righteousness and integrity, has accumulated a 
vast estate of the kind of wealth they have in 
that country yet. But the robbers came and 
took his cattle, and killed his servants; another 
set of robbers took the camels and asses and 
killed his servants. You have the picture; you 
can find it anywhere. The natural forces 
played on the same feelings in the human 
heart. The lightnings flashed and destroyed 
the hope of the heart, just as they do on these 
plains. He could not prevent them, neither 
can we prevent the workings of these natural 
forces. And after awhile disease visits him. 
It is a good picture of smallpox. From the 
crown of his head to the soles of his feet he is 
diseased. You cannot prevent that. This is 
the picture it draws of this good man — the best 
man in the world. And his children — in order 



148 The Witness of Jesus 

to make the picture more intense — ten of them, 
that live around him in their homes — are de- 
stroyed. A cyclone comes down on the desert, 
and turning the four corners of their houses, all 
of them are killed. So he is stripped of his 
property; stripped of his health; stripped of his 
children. The picture is placed alone in all its 
awfulness before him, before the human heart, 
and then three of the wise men of the East — 
being the wisest men in the world — come and 
sit down and study that problem seven days 
without speaking. And they cannot account 
for it. That is the book of Job. 

The first question that we shall ask now is, 
Why was he punished? If this man was in- 
nocent this could not have happened. And 
though these wise men go on with a long argu- 
ment in the most glorious style and try to con- 
vince him of his sin, Job denies it. He says, I 
know you are wrong. First one and then an- 
other makes his speech and tries to convince 
him that he did sin; and if he had not sinned 
this could not have happened. They said, "We 
have heard from our fathers; we know the ex- 
perience of the world; we know God does man- 
age the world that way; we know all about 
God." Such men always talk that way. They 
say God always manages the world that way, 
and nobody ever perished that was innocent. 
But Job says, "I know you are wrong; I wish I 



The Law of Retribution 149 

did know what caused this; I wish there was 
between me and God somebody to understand 
this problem; I know it is not because I have 
sinned. I cannot understand why it has all 
come, but I know you are wrong." That is 
the way Job speaks. In the last speech the 
man of God comes in himself and he says to 
the three men, God does not govern the world 
that way at all; and Job was right. You had 
all better get him to pray for you and make 
sacrifices. This was the discussion of that 
tremendous problem that makes the heart stand 
still. The Old Testament cuts the whole thing 
up by the roots. But natural suffering is not in 
this case the result of sin at all. 

And when Jesus was here the same problem 
was brought to him in a most pointed way. 
The Pharisees said the same thing: "We know 
that where suffering is there is sin; and there 
would not be any suffering if there were no sin; 
and all the suffering came because Adam fell; 
we know that." And they brought him a man 
one day who was born blind, feeling sure they 
could catch him on this. So they said to him: 
" Master, we know that where there is suffering 
there is sin; but here is a man born suffering — 
born with the greatest of human calamities in- 
flicted upon him — born blind. Now, who 
sinned, this man or his parents, to cause this?" 
They knew it was sin; it must have been either 



150 The Witness of Jesus 

this man's sin or that of his parents. Jesns 
says, "Neither because of this man's sin nor 
that of his parents, was he born blind. God 
does not manage the world in that way. It is 
not his parents nor his ancestors. God has 
placed us here subject to this great possibility 
of human suffering, and out of it shall come, 
someday, his glory." Jesus explained it in 
that way. Now we turn back to this problem 
that we left. There is a suffering which is a 
penalty, and the vast amount of suffering on 
this earth on that account no man can measure. 
Such is the restlessness, the heartache, the 
hurt in the soul, that men have by their own 
wrong action. The answer of it all comes to 
this: it is because they did something that 
caused it. If I put my hand in the flame, 
I will feel pain; if I do an unjust thing, if I 
do that which I am taught either by my belief 
or by my knowledge to be wrong I have that 
hurt that God has made in my nature and 
conscience. That is what conscience means. 
Now, then, if this is a law, it is a uni- 
versal law, and supports the proposition that 
I have already stated as regards that kind 
of suffering. Now I am speaking of that kind 
of suffering and dishonor. Where there is 
suffering of this kind, there is sin as its cause. 
And it is a universal law. It will be true in 
this world and in any other to which men can 



The Law of Retribution 151 

go, because it is a universal law. Newton dis- 
covered the law of gravitation. They won- 
dered for awhile why it controlled this planet. 
They came after awhile to go a little further, 
and finally the philosophers understood the 
matter of the universal existence of this law. 
Make the universe as infinite as you can, and 
it is never anywhere without this law; it is uni- 
versal. Just so in regard to the great law of 
evil in its causation; where there is sin there 
will be suffering in the world. 

And then I go a step further, for I must be 
loyal to the' convictions of my mind, as I have 
no right to trifle with them. I go further and 
see another law modifying this, yet in some 
respects fitting right up to it. Where the 
cause is moved away the effect will cease. 
There is no exception to that. In the whole 
universe of God if you want to take the effect 
away you must take the cause away, and that 
is true always and everywhere, in time or eter- 
nity, in this world or any other world. Then 
the question is, how long will a man suffer? 
Just as long as he sins; and he will stop suffer- 
ing on account of sin, when he shall have 
stopped sinning. That has led to one of the 
great principles of what is called the "New 
Theology." That part of it is true. But I will 
show to you that there are other considerations 
that will modify that. Now the question 



152 The Witness of Jesus 

comes up, How caii a man be stopped from 
sinning? Without taking your time for further 
discussion, I will ask, what power exists to 
stop men from sinning? They are going to 
suffer just as long as they sin. What power 
exists in the whole universe of God to stop men 
from sinning? I am using very plain words, 
intentionally. I put it in this way: All power 
— such is the New Testament teaching — which 
God has to stop men from sinning is in Christ. 
He has made that law an everlasting one. Now 
I mean by that, that when you get out of the 
life of Jesus Christ all the moral forces that are 
in it — the truth, the love, the moral power — and 
bring those to bear upon the human soul, if 
they do not stop man from sinning, nothing 
else can. He is "God manifest in the flesh." 
That is my difficulty as respects man's salva- 
tion. If the Christ, with the whole trend, as 
far as we can possibly conceive it, of his nature, 
is brought to bear on the soul of a man to pre- 
vent him from sinning, and cleanse him from 
the sin already committed, if that cannot stop 
it here, what can? This is God's power. This 
is Paul's conception of it — the gospel of Christ 
is God's power to save. God has power to 
make a world of this kind, but he has not pow- 
er to stop a man from sinning. The physical 
power brought to bear upon a man has nothing 
to do with his feelings, convictions, motives. 



The Law of Retribution 153 

It is the moral force; the motive, that is the law 
of causation in the great world of mind, that I 
am living in now, and if you cannot influence 
a man that way, by presenting motive, you 
cannot by any other. I can take a stone and 
put it in the wall with my hand. I can take a 
bridle and put it on a horse or a mule. But I 
cannot use my hands and a halter on you, be- 
cause you are a man, you have intelligence, vo- 
lition. God has made you otherwise; and I 
have to give you a reason; lay before you an- 
other motive and bring another power to bear 
on your mind. God has given us that kind of 
moral constitution, and He approaches us in 
that way. He does not ask us to respect a God 
of force. He does not expect to deal with us 
as if we were things, not men. He expects to 
deal with us in harmony with the laws that He 
has already given to us; and that is the reason 
he presents to us this life of Christ in all its 
infinity of truth and love. That is how he 
deals with us on this question of sin and retri- 
bution. He brings his power — the only kind 
of power he has to thwart and stop a man from 
sinning — to bear in that infinite tenderness and 
beauty in Christ Jesus, and if that does not stop 
us, what will? 

The old conception that when a man has 
lived wrong, has been blinded by passion in 
this world, that when he dies he sees fully all 



154 The Witness of Jesus 

his past life, sees all the wrong and crime and 
sin that he never saw before; that he also sees 
an eternity of remorse — I do not believe that at 
all. That is not according to nature or God. 
My theory is wherever a man can repent in any 
part of this universe he can be saved. As long 
as a man can repent he can be saved. He 
says, when he speaks of the coming in of the 
new dispensation, the man that has tasted of the 
good word, who has been made a partaker of 
the Holy Ghost, if he shall fall away it is im- 
possible to renew him again to repentance. 
The trouble of the inspired writer is that a man 
can get so that he cannot repent. That is my 
trouble. I can see a man sinning; he may stop; 
I can see him get a little deeper, and the soul 
becomes callous, and he becomes less sensitive. 
I persuade him; his mother, the church, soci- 
ety plead with him. He goes wrong, and does 
not overcome it; and he passes out of this life 
on that facilis decensus averni. What powers 
are there any greater than these? 

Now I do not want to believe that any man 
will suffer forever; but I do not see how I can 
help it. Every instinct of my heart turns away 
from the picture of eternal suffering. I cannot 
see a man suffer excruciating tortures, year 
after year, without absolute suffering myself. 
And to think of the soul suffering in eternity, 
why, I have no taste for it and if it were possi- 



The Law of Retribution 155 

ble for me to escape that belief, I would escape 
it. I tell you frankly if any man can snow me 
anywhere any way out of it, I will gladly take 
that way to escape. But here is the difficulty 
I have already anticipated. God's power has 
been exerted on a sinner, in Christ and the 
gospel, in all moral influences, in society, in 
retributions that have come from wrong doing, 
day by day and step by step, and these have 
been resisted and he grown stronger and might- 
ier in evil, and then passes on to the other side. 
Is God any greater there than he is here? God 
has stood before him. He has opposed him in 
every way that He could. He saw it. God 
has no other way to oppose wrong doers than 
the way in which he is opposing them here 
every day. He holds before them the whole 
system of his retribution in nature, and the love 
of God in Christ, and all the persuasion of men 
and angels every day, every hour. I say God 
is here, and has as great power here as on the 
other side. I do not see how he can stop men 
from sinning. If men go on suffering and sin- 
ning till they get to that degree of evil momen- 
tum that they cannot stop; until their heart has 
grown hard and callous, so that they may suf- 
fer and not know it — what is going to stop 
them from sinning and suffering through all 
eternity? I do not see it. Then we have the 
operation of the great law of God, the law that 



156 The Witness of Jesus 

we see surrounding us in the universe, that hu- 
man society does suffer. This is how it runs; I 
give the illustration of a man that is given to 
drink. He takes a little. He does not think 
there is any harm in it. Nobody ever has any 
idea that he is going to be a drunkard. You 
know it is dangerous, and you tell him so. He 
says, "Well, I won't." I have talked to men 
long that way, and heard them all answer the 
same way. He goes a little further and a little 
further, until finally you see it is getting pos- 
session of him. You protest kindly, lovingly. 
He says, "I see it is wrong." But you will 
see him after awhile drawn by society and so- 
cial life still further down. You see it in the 
flush on the cheek, and in his recklessness. Is 
there no way to stop him now? You say to 
him, "Here are the reasons: you will lose your 
influence with respect to your fellow men; you 
are losing your business position; don't you see 
you are losing your place in the world?" He 
will say, "I see it; I will never do it again." 
But after awhile his old desire comes back; you 
get another argument; that one would not do; 
he does not respect the opinions of men; he 
needs stronger arguments than that, and you 
go and say to him: "Your father and mother, 
brothers and sisters, are all in grief." And he 
will cry like a child — I have had them do that 
— and say he will never touch it again; I have 



The Law of Retribution 157 

had them say that. And after a little while he 
is drunk again. That's the way he goes. The 
heart has lost its power. The love of the fa- 
ther, whose grief over it has made him gray- 
haired, has lost its power. Society, money, 
none of them have power. You go to him and 
say, "Iyook at that wife you have loved, and 
your children, in cold and wretchedness," and 
the man will tremble like a leaf. He will weep 
as if his heart would break, and say, "I will 
never touch it again." And you see him drunk 
again. Now, what can you do? Nothing at 
all. There is no motive in heaven or earth, in 
society, in kinship: you have no other argu- 
ment, and he goes onto delirium tremens and a 
drunkard's grave. When you have a man sin- 
ning against himself and against Christ, against 
right, and you hold up before him truth in his 
childhood, in his youth, and in his manhood, 
and old age, and he goes out of this world sin- 
ning, how can you help it? Tell me. The 
great law underlying that is, if there can be in- 
finite good there can be infinite evil. It looks 
that way to me. And that, I think, is what the 
apostle says here, when he goes to state the 
law by which God deals with individuals and 
nations with regard to character. He says, 
"Tribulation and anguish upon every soul of 
man that doeth evil." And it is the doing of 
evil that brings "tribulation and anguish." He 



158 The Witness of Jesus 

says, it is not because he is a Jew, or Moham- 
medan, or Greek, or Christian that he suffers 
tribulation and anguish, but because he "doeth 
evil." And then, on the other hand, he says: 
"Glory and honor and peace to every man that 
worketh good;" it makes no difference whether 
he is Greek or Christian, Mohammedan or 
Protestant — to the man that doeth good, glory, 
honor and peace to him. 

The only question that comes up now is, 
"What is doing good?" To the Jew it is liv- 
ing up to the law before him. To the pagan 
man, it is doing by nature the things contained 
in the law; as he does not know anything about 
the law. In other words, it is a man living 
according to the very best light he can find. 
To a man in the Christian dispensation, in the 
light of Christ, it is working in Christ and for 
Christ and for all that will bring honor and 
glory and peace to every one that works to 
Him. 

Now that is my view, brethren. The world 
laughs now, when you tell it of his Satanic 
majesty; and that may be the reason why the 
world grows worse. The old spectre of a cloven- 
footed devil ceases to alarm and to terrify. Let 
us wake up in the children's hearts the One 
that has power. Let us wake in the human 
heart fear for one who has the power. Let us 
tell the children that the thing- to be afraid of 



The Law of Retribution 159 

is doing wrong. Sin is what does wrong to the 
soul; evil that is connected with the thought, 
life and character. It is not meant that we 
should fear anything beneath these heavens 
but wrong-doing. No man ought to be afraid 
of anything in God's universe but doing wrong. 
When you see causation running out into eter- 
nity, be afraid of starting on a course of wrong- 
doing. 

This is my understanding of retribution. I 
have given it to you in a mere rude outline. I 
have not time to treat it more fully to-day. But 
it leaves us here in the presence of the future. 
It leaves us here in the midst of our passions, 
in the midst of our darkness and misconcep- 
tions. It leaves us here with the light of God 
shining down upon us from nature and the 
Bible, and asks us to solve that question for 
ourselves. It leaves us looking forward to that 
time, as to what we shall see, and what we shall 
know, "When the mists have cleared away." 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

This is one of those things that infinite love 
has given us to keep our hearts looking at the 
skies above. Of the soul and devotion of 
Christ, and the power of his divine love in our 
hearts, we have this image. God intends to 



160 The Witness of Jesus 

bring his design to every life, to have it bear on 
us in our thoughts, our hearts and consciences. 
He wants to keep us from doing wrong, and he 
holds out an everlasting warning, too. Here 
we have this to-day; if our Father should come 
in person and talk to us, how could he make 
plainer than this his infinite love? Let Him 
talk to you by your coming here. How eter- 
nally anxious He is that He should be in your 
thoughts and heart and that we should remem- 
ber, love, honor and worship Him! Let us 
thank God that we have this opportunity. 



IX 

FOLLOWING JESUS 

Jesus saith unto him, if I will that he tarry till I come, 
what is that to thee? Follow thou me.— -John 21:22. 

I have taken this subject, not because you 
do not know it, but because you do; and for 
another reason, that to many it is very attrac- 
tive, and the arrangement is so simple that it 
is easy to follow and will give me less labor in 
speaking on it than many others. It is neces- 
sary, in view of the condition of my health this 
morning, that I favor myself as much as possi- 
ble. 

One of those conceptions of the Christian re- 
ligion which characterizes this century and 
which is definite and well defined, in contrast 
with the general idea that has run through the 
preceding centuries, is expressed in these 
words — "Follow thou me." This end — the 
following of Jesus of Nazareth — as presented at 
the close of this book — the gospel of John, — is 
the last, highest, and most perfect conception 
of the religion of mankind. All other methods 
of religious life possible, humanity had already 
tried, and their failures were lying before the 
thoughtful world when Jesus came. Through 
how many ages did the religious imagination 
11 161 



162 The Witness of Jesus 

roam! — for men have a religious imagination. 
If you take the old religions of the old nations, 
whose history we have, and study them, you 
can see that what they knew of nature, what 
they could see of the phenomena of the world 
about them, stimulated their imagination, and 
they formed conceptions of divine power and 
bowed before them, — the sun, the moon and 
stars, and the forces of nature. I call these mat- 
ters of religious imagination. Of course they had 
a certain degree of intelligence, but it was the 
imagination that reigned in the religious world 
for so many years. Among the Hebrews, the 
most gifted people, who have the best con- 
science, the most perfect religious nature, we 
have another type of religion — the religion 
of conscience, the religion of duty, the religion 
of law. We all have that side of our nature, 
too, and all these sides of our nature are in all 
the religions, but to speak of that which pre- 
vailed and reigned in each one, we may say 
that, in the Jewish religion, the conscience was 
that which reigned. The law was given to the 
Jew commanding his conscience, and the su- 
preme word to him was duty. What he owed 
as duty seems different to that which we owe. 
He looked at God's law and heard the voice of 
God, who had become known to him, com- 
manding him, "Thou shalt," and "Thou shalt 
not," and his conscience responded — "I 



Following Jesus 163 

?," and, "I ought not;" and that was the 
side of human nature that was developed and 
tried for centuries as the basis of a religion. 
You all know the result. It had been worked 
out and all its results were lying plainly before 
the minds of men in Palestine, in Jerusalem, and 
among those who had had it in charge through 
these years. Before this time there had been 
another form of religious life based on thought, 
on reason, on the intellect. Among the Greeks 
this had been prevalent. They had imagina- 
tion, and they had also some conscience, not a 
great deal, but it could be developed; but that 
side of human nature that reigned supremely in 
the Greek and Roman religions is the intel- 
lectual side. They reasoned about God; they 
reasoned about man; they reasoned about their 
religions; they sought to evolve from the 
phenomena of the universe, from the phenom- 
ena of human thought, from the phenomena 
of human life, a vast system of religion; 
and we know the result of that. This had 
all been tried and failed. It is true there are 
those in the world yet who try to live up to 
what we call the superstitions of the imagina- 
tion. It is true that there are multiplied 
thousands trying to live yet by the simple rule 
of duty — a conception of what the conscience 
dictates, of what we owe to God. It is true, 
also, that we have in our religious civilization, 



164 The Witness of Jesus 

on the very top of it, one of the most cul- 
tivated systems of thought in the world, that is 
following the example of the Greeks; that is 
working and trying to work out of the results of 
science, reason and philosophy, a vast system 
of religious thought on which the world's 
life can be built. These had all been tried and 
had failed before Christianity came. I think 
it is not difficult for us to understand now that 
this world needs something more than what I 
shall call a creed-religion. It needs a life — an 
historical life. It needs a life that man can 
know something about, can understand. Not 
many men have an imagination chaste enough 
and cultivated enough to save them from the 
lowest forms of superstition, when they go 
down to the imagination. Not many men, 
leaving the heart out and taking the con- 
science, have conscience enough to hold the 
life level to a pure standard. And we know 
that the vast majority of men have not intel- 
lectual culture and power enough to live by a 
high and even true standard of philosophy. 
No better thinkers have ever been in the world 
than Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. These three 
constituted a great trinity, and created a sys- 
tem of philosophy as great as the world has 
ever seen. A few men at the top knew 
about it, but the vast majority of the people 
lived in idolatry the same as before. If we are 



Following Jesus 165 

to have a religion of that kind, what are the 
men or the women to do in our age, or any- 
other age, who carry on this world's business? 
What will those men who drive the plows, use 
the planes and are engaged in the mechanical 
construction of engines, ever know of high in- 
tellectual philosophy? But they all may know 
something about religion, if the story is told in 
a simple way, of that life which means enough 
to win the mind and heart. They can follow 
that. And this is the reason the infinite Fa- 
ther, in his infinite love, has given to the world 
a religion that all men can embrace, that all 
men can follow. 

Now Jesus was about to leave the disciples, 
and he told one of the apostles — the chiefest of 
them, the one that he was specially concerned 
about — what should happen to him. He had 
been with Jesus in the ministry here. He had 
witnessed the trial at Jerusalem. He had met 
him again after the resurrection from the dead. 
He desired to know the future. He said to 
Peter, "When you are young you gird yourself 
and walk where thou wilt." And that is true 
of us all. When we are rich in time, when 
our strength is superfluous almost, and the fu- 
ture is all open, long and bright, we gird our- 
selves and go where we will. "But when you 
get old another shall gird you and draw you 
whither you will not." When we get old, life 



166 The Witness of Jesus 

and its duties, pursuits, and operations will 
take hold of us and lead us where we would 
not. Peter said, "What shall happen to this 
man?" Jesus replied, "It does not matter 
what shall happen to anybody in the universe; 
the one important matter is, Follow thou me." 
That means you and me and every one of us. 
He said in effect, "You have seen me; you 
have walked after me in the paths about Jeru- 
salem, and on the hills and mountains of Gali- 
lee; and when I have gone higher, whatever 
may happen to everybody else in all the world, 
all you have to do is to keep your eye upon me 
and follow me." This is the great lesson 
which is seen in the central truth of Christian- 
ity. 

But now how can we follow that Iyife? Who 
can follow a life unless it lives in some way in 
touch with our own life? It must be a human 
life; it must be a life lived as our lives are — in 
our atmosphere, in the light upon which we 
look, with organs like those which we have. We 
could not follow an angel. He is not made 
like we are. His activities are not conducted 
like ours. He moves through the universe in 
ways in which we cannot move. And if it had 
been said that we should follow some beautiful 
angel, we should have been entirely at a loss 
what to do. We could not have done that. If 
the infinite Jehovah had said to the world, 



Following Jesus 167 

"Follow me," we could not have done that. 
We are not spirits, and we cannot live like a 
spirit. We had just as well try to follow a fish 
in the sea, or a bird in the atmosphere. We 
are not organized like they are, and we cannot 
go like they go. If anyone says, " Follow me," 
then he must walk like I do; and when I can 
see the footsteps and the tracks he Reaves be- 
hind, then I can place my feet in those tracks 
and walk on. And this is why the incarnation 
was necessary. The whole of what is meant 
by the great fact of the incarnation is in this: 
God wanted men to follow him; to live like He 
lived; to think like He thought; to follow the 
activities that are divine. But how could men 
do that unless He became a man; unless He 
showed Himself to us in human form; unless 
he came to us in our way of living; unless he 
thought, lived, felt, rejoiced and wept as we 
do? Before this could be said to the human 
race the incarnation was an absolute necessity. 
And this is what we have in the beginning of 
these gospels. Jesus is born an infant, like as 
we are. He grew up as we grow up, strength- 
ened in body and spirit as we are. And then 
the great life of God begins to show itself here. 
Only the essential facts are given to us, and 
that I think has been justly used in favor of the 
veracity of these books. His birth, his being 
carried to the Temple, that it might be done 



168 The Witness of Jesus 

for him according to the law, in his infancy, 
and one other fact in his boyhood, when he 
was 12 years of age, this is all that is given to 
ns of his way of life for thirty years. In the 
apocryphal gospels all that period is brought 
out, and accounts of a vast number of miracles 
and strange things are given. But in these 
gospels they want us to think about the life in 
a way that will do us good, lift us up, lead 
us after Him. And especially in this Fourth 
Gospel, all that is left out. This gospel pre- 
sents to us a life that is begun under influences 
much like those under which ours began. 
Then it began to think, and the strength and 
the body was developed, until it began to ask 
questions, as with the lawyers and doctors in 
the temple. We come to this same experience 
ourselves. Why, you can remember, I can re- 
member, in my boyhood, when I looked at this 
universe, what a picture it was, and how my 
heart burst with questions which I wanted to 
ask, and which I wanted some one to answer. 
And when a man, whom I believed to be a holy 
man, came to my father's house, I would love 
to ask questions. Jesus was in his boyhood in 
Jerusalem asking and answering questions with 
those who were supposed to know God and His 
law. And this is all we have in regard to that 
period of his life spent at home, in the carpen- 
ter shop where his father was working. John 



Following Jesus 169 

the Baptist appears — I need not dwell upon 
this fact — saying, "The eternal kingdom of God 
will reign, and the time has come for that to 
appear. It is necessary there should be some 
preparation, that the minds of men may be 
lifted up and turned towards him, and men be 
caused to think for themselves and get ready 
for a new form of life — the reign of the heav- 
ens. The reign over the human heart, the 
human conscience and the human mind, has 
been absolute; the time has come when God's 
thought shall be given reign." And the peo- 
ple began to gather to meet him, and were 
drawn toward him, and were led to repent of 
their sins and to be baptized in Jordan. Then 
appeared Jesus of Nazareth. He comes to John 
on the banks of Jordan and says — "I want you 
to baptize me." John knew something of him; 
he had some information of the life he lived; 
and he said, "I have need to be baptized of 
thee and comest thou to me?" This is putting 
it on a basis altogether too low. If God's com- 
ing is about to be introduced there is just one 
thing, he says, for you and me to think of, and 
that is, what is right? The question is not 
whether I am better than you, or you better 
than I, or whether I should baptize you, or you 
should baptize me; but simply, are we right? 
That is all there is for you or for me to decide. 
We are here to fulfill all righteousness, to do 



170 The Witness of Jesus 

everything that is right in the universe of God. 
And now, he says, I want you to baptize me 
because it is right. He does not stop to ex- 
plain it. Whether John could have under- 
stood it, or whether we could understand it, is 
another question. He simply says, do this; so 
John baptized him. There is one practical 
consideration here which demands a passing 
word, and that is this: "Why," people often 
say, "there are people in the church that are 
not sinless and pure, and here are men, out of 
the church, moral in every way; why leave 
them out?" We have the example here, for 
Jesus said it was right for him to be baptized. 
Do you want to put any question about that to 
me? We shall see directly what that necessity 
was in his case. It was necessary that a posi- 
tion should be taken before the whole universe. 
It is necessary for you and me, for he is acting 
now for us all, if we are following him. It is 
not especially for his own needs, but for your 
needs and mine. We come every one of us to 
that time of life when there appears to be be- 
fore us just the same issue. Jesus is in Galilee 
calling the people together. Here is the great 
world outside living their way. Here are those 
around that have heard of Jesus' message, and 
they all had worshiped their way; and each 
said, I have come to the point where I must 
take one direction or the other. I must remain 



Following Jesus 171 

in the world, and let trie universe know my 
position, or I must take my stand with the 
people of God. Jesus was in that condition and 
he said it is right. He says that this whole 
universe shall understand his attitude toward 
God's people. And you young people, every 
one of you, will come to the time when you 
will have to decide that question. Here is the 
church. The church is all to you. Here are 
the men and women you have known, preach- 
ing God's word, praying, meeting together, 
and forming a body that is worshiping God. 
Here is this world outside. You will have to 
decide which position shall be yours. Men come 
to that point where the ways of life diverge, 
and they must take the ways of the world or 
the ways of the church. We all come to that 
point, and we decide just which we will do. 
Jesus decided that for us. He says, "It is right 
that I should stand with God's people; that I 
should stand with those who are in the king- 
dom of God; and therefore it is necessary that I 
should be baptized. It shall be manifest to the 
whole world who I am, and where I am." 
I do not care how good you are, I do not 
care how purely you have been raised, nor 
where you stand, it will be necessary some 
time in life that you say to God, angels and 
men, "My place is in the church, and not in 
the world;" and when you come to that time 



172 The Witness of Jesus 

you will have to do like Jesus did. When John 
baptized him and he came out of the water, 
then there was a voice out of the heavens say- 
ing "This is my son." That was meant for 
you and for me, and everyone. 

When a true faith in God and in Christ, 
when a great movement in your own soul 
arises, you say, "I cannot stay in the world; I 
must be with God's children." When you go 
down into the waters and come up therefrom 
the voice is there, whispering forever, "This is 
my son." It is the adoption. "That is my 
Father," Jesus says, "and this is the way I fol- 
low." We must look at the great historical life 
of Christ and see if we can go after it, or follow 
it along all these points. The temptation you 
are familiar with. This is the very next thing 
after he came up out of the water and when he 
went into the wilderness. The great tempter 
came to him as he comes to us all. You will 
begin to wonder how I am going to harmonize 
this with what I said last Lord's day. There 
is no difficulty about that. I conceive of this 
temptation as I think the majority of those who 
study it and teach it now conceive of it. He 
goes alone. He sits down and thinks. He 
has a life to live. May not his thought have 
run this way: "I have placed myself in this 
position before the universe. The kingdom of 
God is to be established in me. Here are two 



Following Jesus 173 

ways — the world has one way, and God has 
another way. The world's way is to follow all 
its craftiness, and its desires; and God's way is 
the way I have already started. I will do what 
is right. I must do that. The world's way is 
to turn everything into bread." 

Oh, the vast power of this world for making 
bread to-day! The tempter says in every 
thought and every heart, "You are strong and 
you are young, and you have years to live per- 
haps, in which to develop your splendid powers. 
You are away from home now. Father and 
mother took care of you in your youth and child- 
hood, but you are a young man now." And 
the young man says, "I will go out into this 
wide world and see what I can do." And the 
voice comes, "Make bread; turn the opportuni- 
ties here about you into bread." And when 
you see what this world is doing, we know that 
the tempter has been here; we know that the 
voice has been in every thought and every 
heart. The activities of the human hand and 
the human brain are making bread and piling 
it up mountain high all over the world, or that 
which is the equivalent, to feed the body of 
man. Bread stands for that side of life. 

There is more of all this than I have time to 
talk to you about this morning. Jesus said, "I 
am here for man; I have taken the nature and 
place of a man, to live his life, his true life, as 



174 The Witness of Jesus 

God fashioned it, and as God sees it. I live 
not by bread alone. It is made out of these 
stones. As if he had said, I know that I have 
this body; I know that I have to clothe it; I 
know that I have to find a place for it to sleep. 
But the life of an animal can have that; man's 
real life is fed on bread that comes out of the 
mouth of God. This truth is too vast a con- 
ception, too high, for all that which constitutes 
the earth-life of the soul. Yet that soul must 
live, and if it lives it must live on bread that 
comes out of the mouth of God. That is the 
life of man, to feed on that. "Come on," he 
says, "follow me." Young man, when you 
get away from your father's house; when you 
get into the great wilderness of the world; 
when you sit down to think what you shall do 
with the power you have, the whisper of the 
tempter comes telling you to use it to secure 
fortune, ease, comfort. Then go to the great 
Teacher, and let Him tell you that you have 
another life, a true, a divine life — a life that 
came from God, and that it can live only on 
bread that cometh out of the mouth of God. 
Here we have another great fact. That is what 
temptation means. That temptation is to me 
the most wonderful thing I ever studied. It is 
a mystery when we think of it. We come into 
this world so feeble. The first voice is the cry; 
the first consciousness is helplessness; and you 



Following Jesus 175 

go only a few steps till something pulls you 
and pulls you wrong. You only go a little 
way until you find something like a serpent's 
tooth in the heart; always tempted and sinning 
and falling. What are you to do? We all 
pass through the wilderness. Jesus says, the 
thing to do is to live on this bread; eat like 
children do in regard to their bodies; the little 
feeble things try to walk and fall down; they 
take a step or two and then fall again. This 
is their cry; what do you do? Feed them; 
keep feeding them, to keep them in health; 
and some day they will walk, and not stumble; 
some day they will run and not fall. There 
will be no danger; you have fed them. Jesus 
says in this world of temptation, where the 
soul has this experience and this weakness 
drawing it hither and thither, u L,ive on the 
truth; feed on it as bread that comes out of the 
mouth of God." Some day you will be 
tempted and not sin; that is what it means, my 
friends. Why, there would be no hope for me 
or anybody else, if I did not have a future like 
that. There I can stand with all the vast fu- 
ture extending before me, and before angels 
and men, and take my part in the universe 
without danger of sinning. It is just like it is 
in your physical activities; you can walk with- 
out any danger of falling, and some day, if you 
live right, all the temptation of the universe 



176 The Witness of Jesus 

may be brought to bear upon you and you will 
be tempted and not sin. He says, live like 
that. 

These are the temptations. I have not time 
to dwell upon them now. There is a whole 
sermon in each one of them. I wish I had 
time to take that look that Jesus took on top 
of the mountain. There were kingdoms and 
power, the glory of this world, brought before 
him iu a vision. All these were offered to him 
if he would fall down and worship Satan. That 
is one way to get dominion over the world. 
With their vast powers, some are doing like 
the Pharisees of this world do; nattering men, 
studying everything men want; going and ask- 
ing what he wants first. But the king says, 
" Stand by the right; do that forever." One 
of these ways will lead up, and then there is a 
fall. The other will lead you to Gethsemane 
and Mount Calvary, and you say, "Go away, 
Satan, I am going to do right if it brings the 
cross." This is the experience that every man 
has; and it has a great effect on his life. There 
come to him two great forms of religious 
thought on the one side and on the other. Now 
there were men and churches already here; and 
they already knew everything that man ought 
to have and do and say. The Pharisees had 
studied the Bible from Moses down. They 
understood it; they knew how to interpret 



Following Jesus 177 

every passage in it. They had all the rules 
and laws by which man should live. And they 
came, as they come now, to every man that 
comes into the world, saying, "Come to me; 
I can aid you to live; I have got the doctrines 
and the interpretation and everything ready.' ' 
And the Sadducees came on the other side. 
They were all wrong; they did not understand 
Scripture, they did not understand life, 
they did not understand God. They said, 
"Come with us." Both sides claimed him, 
and they will claim you the same way. You 
cannot come into this world and not have this 
issue. I am talking of this experience with 
the tempter. You will not come into the 
church or begin to be concerned about it, until 
the issue is pressed upon you. I have shown 
you that the world had tried all these systems 
of law, of traditions, of the imagination, of 
philosophy. This world wants no Phariseeism, 
Kssenism, Sadduceeism nor anything else of 
that kind. The world wants the life of the 
great Master. He made enemies of the Phar- 
isees and Sadducees. He rejected both, and 
went on living the way they condemned. He 
went on asking what men need. Here is 
the blind man; here, the lame man; here are 
lepers; here are ignorant men, helpless men; 
here are men in sorrow and trouble; here are the 

poor toilers — what can I do for them? What 
12 



178 The Witness of Jesus 

can I do to lift them up and make them happy 
and joyful? He says, "I will follow neither 
Phariseeism nor Sadduceeism; I will see what 
I can do by opening the eyes of the blind; 
taking the leprosy from the bodies and souls of 
men; and I will see what I can do with these 
poor toilers by making them know my Father's 
will." But they said to him, "We will not 
have that; we want you to live like we do." 
The church said that to him. The church 
said, "You will have to go our way; if you do 
not, you will be an enemy." He said: "I 
must do my Father's will. This is what he 
sent me for." This is that life. We are look- 
ing at it. The issue is sharp. You cannot go 
your way any longer. It is a question of life 
and death now. I must be obedient to that, 
even if I go to Gethsemane. When you come 
down to that, and read this great lesson of the 
human heart; when you have been in Geth- 
semane with Jesus — and no man can go 
through this world and not find Gethsemane 
somewhere; when the shades shall fall, and 
the cold dew of evening shall rest upon you, 
then you will lift up your breaking heart and 
say, "Father, this cup is bitter." You never 
saw anybody go through this world that did 
not have that to say. You may be the son of 
God, and God may love you, and the heavens 
and the sun may shine above you, but that 



Following Jesus 179 

Gethsemane will come. Some day a voice that 
is sweeter to you than all the angels in heaven 
will grow silent. Some day you will see fall- 
ing from you the form of mother, of child, of 
husband or wife, and you will fall down in that 
Gethsemane and say, "O my Father, take this 
cup away; it is too bitter; I cannot drink it!" 
Earth has a Gethsemane for us, and Jesus says, 
"Come after me and I will show you a way out 
of it." And your heart shall say, "Not my will 
but thine be done." The angels came to that 
Gethsemane. We do not need the doctrines of 
the Pharisees, nor the philosophies of the Sad- 
ducees. We do not need the imagination of 
genius to make it beautiful, to get rid of all its 
superstition. We do not need the philosophy 
of the Greeks. That which we need is this 
life in the heart. We need Jesus to walk be- 
fore us, to take steps for us, so that we can put 
our feet in the tracks left behind. He looks 
behind and says, "Come on; follow me." And 
when you cry, God hears that cry just like a 
mother. You never heard a little child cry in 
agony and distress, that the mother did not run 
right to it at once. And he sends his angels, 
and you say, "Nevertheless, not my will but 
thine be done." Then you have solved the 
problem. 

But we follow on right through Gethsemane 
and watch to see where we are going. And 



180 The Witness of Jesus 

after a little while we go into the shadows of 
Mount Calvary, and then we begin to see we 
are going to follow him to the tomb, away 
from the light of the sun of friendship. Yes, 
follow right on. We want a life we can follow, 
and we can follow him there. That is what 
they will do — nail him to the cross and leave 
him there alone. A cry of agony shall come 
out of his mouth at the last moment. They 
will come and take him down and lay him in 
that grave, and then he stays a little while 
here on earth where you see him again. 
Blessed be God, we can follow on; this is the 
life we follow. The disciples gathering about 
them that strange thought, have not found out 
what this vast story of infinite love is to their 
souls. One day they go out a little way from 
Jerusalem. While their hearts were burning 
with strange wonder, He is lifted up to go to the 
throne of God. And he says, "Come, follow 
me!" Follow thou me, and then you shall 
know what all this means. We can do that. 
This life of Christ which stands out by itself 
in all history, in all time, in all human experi- 
ence, is the only thing on this earth that I can 
follow; and I can go where it goes. Blessed be 
God, I hear him still say, "In my Father's 
house, among my Father's treasures, I have 
gone to prepare a place for you; follow me on." 
What is it to you, my brother, what happens 



Following Jesus 181 

to you or anybody else? He said to Peter, 
"Do not let that concern you; follow thou 
me." Do that, brethren, and then it will be 
right forever. 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

It will help us, I think, in our pilgrimage in 
the earth to look often at the scene presented 
to us this morning. He wanted to draw the 
hearts of the disciples very closely to him, and 
when he was about to leave them he left this 
picture of that scene on the cross with all its 
experience to himself and to the world. If we 
look up often to him through these emblems 
and bring them freshly and with more power 
to our thought and hearts, it will inspire us for 
another week to keep our eyes upon him and 
try to follow him along the way he walked, 
and along that path he left shining with celes- 
tial light. We want to follow him all the way. 
Let us remember to follow him in all his ap- 
pointments. He is yonder, saying, "Come sit 
down with me on my throne, as I have over- 
come.' * Let us thank God. 

PRAYER. 

We thank Thee, Thou great and loving Fa- 
ther, that as Thy children we may come once 



1 82 The Witness of Jesus 

more to this feast. Blessed be Thy name for- 
ever! Thou art reminding our hearts once 
more of that blessed life which we have been 
studying to-day. Blessed be Thy glorious and 
adorable name. We can always look to Thee 
now. Father, fill our hearts with love and 
worship while we receive these emblems of the 
body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Fill 
our hearts with gladness and joyfulness and 
thanksgiving while we look up to Thee as Thy 
children in the enjoyment of this vast gift, this 
glorious privilege of following Him to Thy 
presence. 

Be with us in all the way we go, and at last 
bring us to Thyself where we can reign with 
Thee forever, and to Thy name we give all the 
praise, through Jesus, now and forever. Amen! 



X 

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD: 
ITS SOURCE AND LIMITATION 

"You worship you know not what: we know what we 
worship. ''''—John 4:22. 

A VERY strong statement and apparently a 
very severe one, is this by Jesus, to a woman 
who supposed, as we all suppose, that she knew 
all about the object of worship. He said to 
her, "You worship you know not what." In 
thinking over this language the question comes 
to me, whether, when we make the best con- 
ception we can of God and of the object of our 
worship, that statement is not applicable to a 
vast number of us. I think it would be. Not 
in pagan lands alone, but even in Christendom 
itself, it would be strictly true, if it were said 
of multiplied thousands of people — "you know 
not what you worship." If we were in India 
we could see people worshiping, and they wor- 
ship everything. Worship is as large a part 
of our mental constitution as thinking. It has 
been so with every age, among every people in 
the world. They have not lived, and they 
cannot live with the mental, moral and spirit- 
ual organization they are born with, and in the 

presence of the great phenomena of the world 
183 



184 The Witness of Jesus 

about them, without worshiping something. 
The feeling is there. It may be rude, untrained 
and ignorant, but it will fasten on something; 
it will take some direction; it will exercise it- 
self in some way, from the very lowest objects, 
from the poorest and shallowest fetich that men 
bow down to, to the loftiest conception that 
men can have of the infinite Being we all try to 
worship. In India and in China, where they 
have the images of their ancestors, and are 
very devoted to them — we would say, "You 
worship you know not what." With our con- 
ception of the Author of the universe; with our 
conception of the omnipresent Spirit in all this 
vast frame of world about us and within us, 
and of the structure of everything that we 
know of, of the movement of everything that 
moves, our own minds and hearts included, we 
can realize the partial, the very inadequate, 
conception of the mind of a man, bowing down 
to some special object in nature, something 
that represents to him that vast spirit of which 
he knows nothing. To all such we would say, 
"You worship you know not what." 

But can we say, as Jesus said, we know 
what we worship? Now I call your attention 
to the w r ord know, as having nothing to do 
with our culture and education. He does not 
depend on the character, the perfections, the 
attributes of the mind — the theory these old 



Knowledge of God 185 

Samaritans had in their minds when they went 
to the temple on Monnt Gerizim and undertook 
to worship God. They had no adequate con- 
ception of that vast, glorious Being. This 
fact was before his mind when he said to them, 
"You worship you know not what.'' There is 
no conviction, I reckon, in the human heart, 
more deeply intrenched, more thoroughly fixed, 
than that. We all think we know what we 
worship. One of the great difficulties, it seems 
to me, in the progress of religious thought, in 
the growth of the world's true conceptions of 
God, is the already settled conviction that we 
know all about Him. Now let me state this 
fact, and it is not an exaggeration at all, 
and I do not say it in a censorious spirit, 
but there is not a theological system in the 
world that is not built on the assumption 
that the makers of it knew all about God, 
and they interpreted God in that way. This 
is assumed in every one of them. They 
know all about God's being, His conscious- 
ness, His actions, His purposes and motives, 
by which He acts, and they explain every- 
thing. That is what theology is. Every 
theological system in the world assumes this 
perfect knowledge of God. They have a clear 
understanding of Him here, and they teach it 
to their children. This is so vital, so important, 
it is a thing of such indispensable necessity to 



186 The Witness of Jesus 

the human mind to know God, that even be- 
fore the time they understand anything, before 
they can incorporate a single thought, we have 
the children commit to memory the language in 
which we express our true conceptions of God. 
Now, this fact is one that has made the world 
think, and is making it think. When these 
systems differ so widely from each other, and 
when you trace that difference in analysis to 
its beginning and source, you find it rests on a 
different conception of God. 

You have the Arminian system which repre- 
sents God and certain features of his character. 
Its authors assume them and build on them. 
Then there is the Calvinistic system, which as- 
sumes another view of God. Its founders build 
on that system, other systems. You take your 
own system, for we have theologians as well as 
other people who think they know all about 
God, who can tell just what God will do in any 
given case. We may go to the newspapers, and 
see the controversies which have arisen in the 
discussion of what God will do, in each partic- 
ular case, where men assume to know so much 
about Him as to know what He will do. There 
used to be an old question like this, as good as 
any I can get. We are told a man ought to be- 
lieve in Christ; ought to believe in God; the 
action of his whole mental nature should be 
turned toward Him; and not only that, but his 



Knowledge of God 187 

sensibility — the heart, we call it, — awakes to 
his true relationship to God. And the spirit, 
turning towards God, is very apt to see a great 
deal in itself that is opposed to Him. That is 
what we call repentance. This is the great 
process of mind that is within us. Then we 
say, he has a will; we want him to act, we 
want the beginning of that consciousness; we 
want him to be baptized into our system; so 
that we have the thought, the intellect, the fac- 
ulties, all of them, and the heart, in the line in 
which he should go toward an infinite Being. 
And when you come to look at it do you 
realize how wonderful it is that this poor finite 
mind of man, no larger than yours or mine, 
that knows so little of the Father, of God, and 
the universe, so little of His word, should un- 
dertake the stupendous assumption that it ab- 
solutely knows God; knows what He would do 
and what He would not do? Such a man wor- 
ships he knows not what. He has something 
in his mind; he has a standard and an ideal; a 
stereotyped form, and all his religious thought 
and life just revolve around that. I believe 
that if Jesus were here, he would say to such 
a man, "You do not know Him." I believe he 
would look into the mind of each of us, see the 
theologies of all of us, into our confident and 
conscious dogmatism, and say to us just what 
he said to that woman: — "Ye worship you 



1 88 The Witness of Jesus 

know not what." It is true you have there a 
character, a standard, a thought of the absolute, 
infinite truth of God; that would be the differ- 
ence. 

But the other conception is in the introduc- 
tion of the word "father," a new word in the 
Jewish vocabulary. The Jews themselves, he 
says, have some true conception of God; they 
knew him as the Creator from whom all things 
came. The Jews never failed to say they knew 
Him in his government, in His great moral 
law that is embedded in the progress of human 
thought, history and experience, of right and 
wrong working in the mind of man. They 
give that to us in the Old Testament. But 
there is a vast chapter in the character of God 
the) 7 did not know. You may read from the 
beginning of Genesis to the end of Malachi; 
you may analyze, as far as you please, the re- 
ligious experiences of these great and good men, 
and you will find that the conception of God 
that Jesus taught had not come to them. The 
hour, he says, is coming, and now is just ar- 
rived, when they shall worship the Father. 
Men can bow down in rudeness and fear of the 
infinite powers of omnipotence that made this 
universe, and they can tremble in the presence 
of the vast infinite power in contrast with hu- 
man imperfections, human sin, and human life 
with all its exiles, punishments and troubles. 



Knowledge of God 189 

They could see that, and they could be very 
much humbled, and here and there a spirit 
would rise up above even that old system of 
law, of power, majesty and greatness, to get a 
little conception of that tenderness within the 
heart of the Father; but Jesus says, now it is 
the "father" which is going to be worshiped. 

I remember a number of years ago a book 
was published, presenting clear, sharp, logical 
views and outlines of theology, and it was re- 
viewed by Mr. Beecher. He made this state- 
ment, and his heart seemed almost torn while 
he was making it: "When I conceive of a being 
creating millions and multiplied millions of 
human beings, in consciousness, with conscious 
fear, conscious intelligence, and determining 
when he made them, and before he made them, 
that they were to suffer forever, throughout all 
eternity, and that for his own glory, that he 
might have spectators, and might be glorified 
— there is no father in this to me." There is 
no "father" in that. There is not a father or 
mother in the world who has a heart like that. 
Jesus says, you are to worship the Father, an 
infinite, eternal Spirit, but the character of a 
father. 

Now, he says, "we know what we worship." 
He is speaking, of course, from his own stand- 
point, as he stood in connection with the Jew- 
ish thought — the best of it — theism. The unity 



190 The Witness of Jesus 

of God, worked out through the ages and devel- 
oped up to this point, was now to show itself. 
It had to be a development out.of that, to make 
it intelligent to the world; and he stands there, 
in his logical connection with it; he stands 
there before the world, showing what we ought 
to worship and how. It seems to me that 
Christian men who look at Him as Father, can, 
in a limited degree, not in an absolute sense, 
say, "We know what we worship." But how 
can they know it? This is a point that has 
got a good deal more in it than you think. 
How could it have been known? How could 
the conception ever have come to the hu- 
man mind apart from the speaker here? It 
seems to me that the coming of Jesus Christ 
into this world, the Son of God, as the brother 
of man, speaking out of his heart when 
he looked up to the Father, and as he looked 
down to his brothers, was an absolute necessity, 
in the vast religious order of the universe, be- 
fore we could ever say, "We know what we 
worship." The faith that I have in view 
stands on a basis like that. It is not merely 
that somebody, a long time ago, thought 
somebody would come, and now that prophecy 
has been fulfilled. The passage was there and 
the fulfillment was there and the thought ; but 
that is not the thing. The thing I look at is 
this great fact in the glorious and eternal order 



Knowledge of God 191 

of the universe. If I am to know God as a 
Father; if I am to know what I worship; if my 
heart is to go out to Him as a child to a par- 
ent; if I am to think of him as knowing me, 
loving me, as pitying me in my weakness and 
imperfections, fmiteness, stumblings, falls and 
mistakes; if I am to think of God in that way, 
I get it out of Christ. He has come, and just 
opened the whole book, and shown that it is 
the Father we worship. Now we know, when 
we read the religion of the Old Testament, that 
the Jews did not have that. It is not in the 
prayers of David; nor in the psalms, nor in the 
language of the prophets. I know the word 
." father,' ' does occur two or three times, but 
that is in a mere accommodative sense, not in 
the sense I am talking about at all. It is no- 
where in the Old Testament; the thought is 
not there. But now the youngest Christian 
knows God as Father, not with an adequate 
conception of an Infinite Being, of course, be- 
cause God's least thought, as old James said a 
long time ago, is vaster than all our under- 
standing, we do not take him into our minds; 
He is too great for us. What we understand 
now has been made known to us in this life of 
Jesus, that is, his love, his tenderness. That 
is what is changing human hearts; not the 
theories of theology but the glorious Being 
whose love we can make known to the heart of 



192 The Witness of Jesus 

a child. This is the power, working in the 
inner consciousness of our being and begetting 
the feeling of responsibility to Him who loves 
us, wants to save us and lift us up and make 
us happy forever. And it is only in that sense 
we can say "we know what we worship.'' 

It may be, and it most likely will be, that 
in a hundred years from now men will live 
that will take what the ages thought, and 
analyze it and say, "How little they knew!" 
Take the best thought that you have and I 
have, and analyze it, separate it out, and see 
how small it is. God is going to keep on un- 
folding Himself to human thought and human 
experience, as long as the universe stands. He 
is going to give us more and more of Himself 
year by year, and there is no thought that 
comes down from the stars of heaven or from 
the depths, that does not take hold of this lan- 
guage of the New Testament and bring out of 
it deeper riches, and bring it home, closer to 
our thought, closer to our hearts, closer to our 
hopes, so that here we can say, "We know 
what we worship." We may not know much, 
but we know that. We know that when God 
has unfolded himself to us, when he has come 
near to us in a way that we can see, apprehend 
and experience, we can say, "We know what 
we worship." "Salvation," Jesus said, "is of 
the Jews." That meant that this vast system 



Knowledge of God 193 

of redemption that is evolving, that is now 
about to be thrown before the world, had its be- 
ginning and history among the Jews, and now 
it is to be placed in the higher, wider, more 
glorious way before the human heart. It never 
could be built up out of imperfect conceptions 
of Samaritans, or Greeks, or anybody else. I 
believe that when it is thoroughly analyzed; 
when we begin to look for its evidence from 
the resurrection; when we have taken up his- 
tory in the unfolding of human thought, we 
shall find that the highest, widest, best, purest 
thought of the world could never have sprung 
from anything else. I believe it is possible for 
us to show that that which has salvation in it, 
has deliverance in it, deliverance of man from 
his worldliness, from his ignorance, from his 
selfishness, from his sin and from all those 
things that stand above him and around him, 
that his salvation had but one possible source, 
it could never have been derived from any other 
conception. True conceptions of God and of 
the forces of nature had come down to us; but 
they had no root, no faith for them to take root, 
and this truth that Christ gives us is the ground 
out of which it comes, and its fruit is growing 
out of that ground, here before the world, and 
now we can think of Him and worship Him 
and love Him as the Father. But dogma let 

us avoid if we can. It is the hardest thing, it 
13 



194 The Witness of Jesus 

seems to me, for humanity to do. Let us avoid 
self-constituted dogmatism; that has done so 
much harm to the spirit of Christ in all these 
ages. Let us avoid the thought that assumes 
that we know it all; that we know all about 
Him; that we know all He will ever do, in this 
world and the world to come. 

I do not know how you think about it, but 
an illustration comes to me now. In the East 
there are men, and I know they are good men; 
they are scholarly men; they are sincere men; 
but for a number of years they have been in a 
white-heated controversy as to what God is go- 
ing to do to people after they leave this world. 
You know that Andover controversy about the 
new theology; and here are men fixed and set- 
tled, saying, "We know just what God will do 
when men die. After this, if they do not act 
according to the way we think they ought to, 
we know what He will do to them in all the 
eternity to come." Another set say: "We 
think it will be different; men will have a 
chance over there." And that raises animos- 
ity, dogmatism and bitterness. That looks 
very strange to me from my standpoint. The 
idea that I should stand with my little mind on 
this planet, seeing so little of God, and sit 
down to dictate to the world just what God is 
going to do in eternity to every man! I leave 
all that to Him. There is one thing I feel in- 



Knowledge of God 195 

terested in — one vast thing — and that is, to 
go ont of this world prepared to live in a 
new one. My faith is abont this way: I be- 
lieve that the best man in this world will 
be the happiest man in the next. That is 
about the most that I know; and I think that 
is the spirit of both Testaments. If you can 
show me the best man here, I can tell you who 
will be the happiest there, and if you will show 
me the worst man here, I will tell you who will 
be the most unhappy man there; that is the 
most I know. If you come to state what God 
will do; how He has framed the moral universe, 
and assume that my mind apprehends the 
whole infinite framework of it, and how every 
man is going to fare through the eternal ages, 
it does not fit into my theology. It looks child- 
ish to me; looks like worshiping something we 
do not know. We assume to know, but we do 
not. Let us avoid that kind of dogmatism. 
Let us be interested above all things in getting 
ready, while we are here, and worship the Fa- 
ther, "in spirit and in truth. " There is no 
danger then. We shall worship the Father 
through the Christ and thus only can we un- 
derstand Him. We will love Him as far as we 
can see; and then when the time comes there 
will be no fear. No one need to have appre- 
hension about the future world if he is right 
in this. And then, when he goes into the 



196 The Witness of Jesus 

other world, let us leave him with that vast, 
infinite Being who knows what to do. There 
are problems too great for me. I don't claim 
to be able to solve them. A man may take the 
text, and does take the text, and says, "I know 
by the text what He will do," and he forgets 
that he is nothing in the world but a poor, 
finite man, to interpret the text, and he may 
be mistaken about the interpretation. Leave 
it with God. Leave to him the consequence, 
but to-day, to-morrow, next week and next 
month, and next year, if I am alive, let me 
have the concern that is all of the heart, out of 
the depth of the heart, to be the best man I can 
be. I can be that by being the best man I 
know how to be; and then I can, within the 
limitation of my finite intellect, know what I 
worship. Salvation has come through Christ, 
and we know the Father and know how to 
worship Him. 



XL 

THE NEW BIRTH: OR EARTHLY 

AND HEAVENLY THINGS. 

"If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, 
how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" — 
John 3: 12. 

I regard this statement of the great Teach- 
er as the true, sharply-stated, underlying sub- 
stance of this conversation with Nicodemus. 
One of the difficulties that we have to refer to 
so often, in our efforts to understand the teach- 
ings of the New Testament, is the preconcep- 
tions we have in our own thoughts. But we 
cannot have a class of minds not filled with 
preconceptions that will be awakened and 
brought into intense activity by words, so that 
they simply look and ask for the meaning of 
things. If we had we should have very little 
difficulty — very much less than we have — in 
understanding these divine teachings. But no 
one now, after several hundred years of theo- 
logical mysticism, can even read this chapter 
of John without arousing convictions in the 
mind of every one of a clearly defined concep- 
tion of the new birth. We have been taught, 
each one of us, according to the church in 

which we have been brought up, a special the- 
197 



198 The Witness of Jesus 

ory of the new birth or regeneration, and each 
one brings with him his own theology of the 
way it is done and its true cause, and each one 
thinks he finds his special conception of it, and 
all the processes that he believes in, either im- 
plied or fully set forth in this third chapter of 
John. 

Now let us try, as far as possible, to get rid 
of our preconceptions and look at the thought 
of Jesus just as it is. I w T ill at least try to give 
you my thought, although the difficulty of giv- 
ing you my thought is that your own comes up 
and gets in the way. That is the trouble we 
have to-day. My conception of the lesson on 
the whole is, broadly, this: We have here, as I 
think, for the first time in the teaching of 
Jesus, the broad and clear distinction that He 
makes between the two sides of our nature. 
We have a nature with two sides to it. One 
side of it relates to the earth; the other side 
relates to the higher world above us and in us. 
He wants to make a distinction between these 
two parts that come up to him so forcibly in 
the man that is talking to him. He has met a 
man who is in the condition in which you have 
often been in your life ; a man who is so involved , 
engrossed and interested on one side that he 
does not see the other — a religious man, too, a 
good man. There are people that way and they 
are conscientious people. But there are people 



The New Birth 199 

who seem to have a great deal more of what we 
call the material in their lives than the spirit- 
ual. There are others who have a great deal 
more of the spiritual, and less of the material 
and natural. You often meet that kind of peo- 
ple. Now you have a man here whose opinion 
is strongly materialistic. He recognized God, 
and he recognized that God as law, and that he 
is under obligations to keep that law and live 
according to its commandments; but the whole 
of it is in his earthly relationships; he is unable 
to see anything above that. Jesus reads this in 
the mind of the man at once. He is very mate- 
rialistic; he is honest and sincere; he has gotten 
the idea that there is something more than he 
had known before. This man, about whom 
people are gathering, and whose thoughts and 
whose actions plainly indicate he is God, surely 
no one could do such things as He who had not 
come from God; and he would like to know 
about this. Jesus introduces this distinction 
that I have told you about; it is a general, broad 
distinction. He says, the kingdom of heaven 
is the one I am interested in; you are interested 
wholly in the kingdom of the earth — of the 
world, the kingdom of Judea. You have your 
conception of it; it is the conception of an 
earthly kingdom including the peoples about 
you, and your earthly relations to that king- 
dom. That is all the idea of the kingdom you 



200 The Witness of Jesus 

have. But I am talking to the people about an- 
other kingdom; I am talking to the people about 
another set of relations besides those which you 
know about and in which you live. And this 
kingdom of God that I am talking about a man 
cannot see unless a great change takes place 
in him. It has not taken place in you. " Ex- 
cept a man be born from above he cannot see 
the kingdom of God." And we can under- 
stand very easily how he used that word "see." 
A man could see very plainly with his eyes; 
with the eyes which Nicodemus had he could 
see the kingdom he lived in; he was a member 
of the Sanhedrim; he was a part of the execu- 
tive government of the city; he knew all of its 
organization — all of its processes of govern- 
ment, and they were just as visible to him as 
the State of Missouri, which we see and in 
which we live. We can read the constitution 
with our eyes easily; we can see the officers 
that are placed by law to control us. We can 
see the life that everything conscious is living 
or aiming to live; it is all a visible thing; you 
see that with the eyes by which you see the 
sun and the world. But, Jesus says, the king- 
dom I am talking to you about, men do not see 
that way at all; it is not that kind of a king- 
dom; it is something to be seen with other 
eyes — the eyes that are in a man — the eyes that 
look upon the invisible. That side of your na- 



The New Birth 201 

ture which you do not see outwardly , I tell you, 
is the one I am talking about. This general 
distinction he is making. And he puts it un- 
der that illustration which gives us the very 
best conception of it, as I understand, it is pos- 
sible for us to have — the illustration of the 
birth. 

When he goes a little further along he says, 
the spirit is born of spirit, and matter, or flesh, 
is born of flesh; if you have been born only of 
flesh, why then you know the material and all 
the material relations; you live in them. That 
is all right; but if you have been born of the 
Spirit then you are placed in another set of 
relations. It takes the fact, the literal fact of 
a birth, to illustrate it; and that brings out the 
mental attitude of the person to whom he is 
speaking. Why, Nicodemus says, how is that? 
There is but one birth; man's life begins with 
that, and how can there be another? We can't 
think of it; it is an unthinkable thing. Jesus 
had already intimated to him he could not see 
it; he had already told him he did not know it. 
Now, he says, the reason of this is, you have 
only had one birth; your body has been born, 
and you have been placed in certain relations; 
you can understand and can realize these, but 
your soul has not been born. It has never been 
placed in that state of relationship to which it 
belongs and in which it can see and live. This 



202 The Witness of Jesus 

gives the whole thought I am to present to you 
to-day. 

There is this difficulty that comes up in our 
minds, and prevents us from seeing the truth, 
when we use the word ''heavenly" we get out 
of the earth; we get somewhere in thought 
beyond the stars. We have got the whole He- 
brew astronomy yet. This was a kind of three- 
storied thing, as you can see from the writings 
of Paul, one above another; one up there, and 
then a third story, and we cannot get that out 
of our minds. And just as I say "heavenly 
things," everybody thinks of something in that 
top story, away off, where God is on the other 
side of the stars. That is another one of those 
things that keep us from understanding so much 
that is rich and ought to be worth so much to 
us. But Jesus did not refer to that, but to this 
side of man's nature here in the world, as he is 
now living and thinking in his consciousness. 
One side of it belongs to earth and is earthly, 
and the other side belongs to heaven and is 
heavenly. It is not that we must go some- 
where to find heaven. These two classes of 
things are in our everyday experience; they 
are two classes of things that we are to realize 
to-day, to-morrow and each day, and we do 
realize them, but mostly on the side of Nicode- 
mus — the earth and earthly things. 

Now, He says, if I have told you earthly 



The New Birth 203 

things and you believe me not, how shall you 
believe if I tell you about heavenly things — so 
far above you? He immediately says to him, 
you ought to know them; "Are you a teacher 
in Israel and knowest not these things?" 

I have not gone into the phase of the sub- 
ject that raises all the mysticism there is in 
that word about the wind, or the spirit. I 
want to leave that out. It does not add any- 
thing to the thought at all. I will just give 
you this thought; there are a great many things 
that we do not understand, nor did Nicodemus 
understand, and this is one of them. He was 
ready to say, "Well, if you let me see this 
thing; let me touch and let me know or even 
construe it to my intellect, like my fingers are 
to my eyes, then I can accept it," like those 
same scientists that even now refuse to believe 
anything, or to have any faith at all in any- 
thing that is not perfectly clear to the sight of 
the eye. Jesus said, these earthly things even, 
go away beyond your vision, if you will follow 
them. You do not understand what there is 
about anything I have been talking about. 
You only know a few things even about the 
natural birth. As it is often said you see the 
grain come up; you know a few facts about it; 
but how does it grow? Some of these things 
you don't know at all, even about the earthly 
things that come out of the earth. He is aim- 



204 The Witness of Jesus 

ing to awake the mind of the listener to some- 
thing that goes beyond the plane on which he 
is standing. He is aiming to show him the 
vast universe of the great God; where every- 
thing goes away beyond our comprehension. 
We can see a few things immediately above us, 
lying against us, and, following just as far as 
our understanding will take us, we then say, 
there is nothing beyond that. That is the 
trouble. That is the reason why so many peo- 
ple have difficulty in believing the future life. 
They have never been there, they say. They 
come along, therefore, so far, and then cannot 
see any further with their natural eyes, and 
they say, there is nothing else. He is dealing 
with that class of minds; he has one of them 
before him. 

How many things are plain to you now that 
would have been impossible even of conception 
a generation ago — earthly things too! You 
would not have believed at all one-half of what 
you believe now, a generation ago. Who 
would have believed, a generation ago, if 
some one had told him, that you could sit 
down yonder at the courthouse and talk to 
a man in the city as easily as if he were 
in your room. That is an earthly thing; you 
would not have believed that a generation ago. 
Now at your breakfast, every morning, you 
read just what they said yesterday in Europe. 



The New Birth 205 

You could not have believed that. I could not. 
Even when I was a young man in college; when 
I was studying Herschel's astronomy; and the 
professor thought he knew a good deal about 
it, and he had his globes and apparatus there 
to show us; if he had told us then that in a 
little while we could find a man looking at the 
sun who would tell us what it is made of; who 
would look at the stars in Orion, in Signus, in 
all those constellations, and tell us what they 
are made of, whether it is phosphorus or iodine 
or other metals or materials, I would have said, 
"I don't believe it!'' The idea that man can 
here on earth, by his intellect, just by looking 
into the thing with an intellectual vision, with 
the assistance of a little instrument, turned up 
to an object hundreds of millions of miles away, 
tell you just what it is made of, as he can take 
a piece of rock and earth and tell you what it is 
made of, would have been incredible. Even 
earthly things half of the people now do not 
believe at all. And we look on those who 
know that they are true, those who understand 
them, and we say that they cannot believe 
them. They feel sorry for us because we can- 
not; that is all. He said, if these earthly things 
you believe not, what would be the use of tell- 
ing you things that are true, but more myste- 
rious than even these? That is the form of 
thought presented. You have now, he says, 



206 The Witness of Jesus 

what is capable and susceptible of heavenly 
relations, and there can be a change wrought 
on that which is your spirit, that will bring it 
into conscious relation to these heavenly 
things. But Nicodemus could not understand 
it; it was a mystery to him. 

Now we can understand it. If you take two 
sets of relations now, and understand them, 
you can get the same thought out of them. We 
know into what relationships our earthly birth 
can bring us. A certain relation of man and 
woman — your father and mother — and there is a 
child. That birth brings me in relation to my 
parents. That is the first thing it does. The 
next thing it does is to give me my name; I in- 
herit the name of the family. The next thing 
it does is to give me a home where I live, 
where I was born; and that birth brings me 
into those relations to my home; brings me 
into relations with those who are about me, so 
that all that is done for me in the way of food 
and clothing, and care and help, in sickness 
and weakness, I get that out of those relations 
by my birth. The fact that my father and 
mother loved me, and their home is mine, their 
name is mine, grows out of my relation to 
them, and all that I need, all joy and pleasure, 
or life or comfort, they gave me. From that 
natural birth I got name, I got my home, I 
got life, I get the possibilities of life; I get 



The New Birth 207 

education, training, discipline. The greatest 
thing my parents can give me is the expendi- 
ture of their thought and their money and com- 
fort to teach me self-denial — to place me under 
the care of teachers and train me — qualify me 
for a life beyond this. Now we get that out of 
the earth birth. But, Jesus says, "There is 
another father besides this father and mother 
you have here;" and He came to tell us about 
that Father in heaven and this other birth. 
And this birth puts you in relation to Him, the 
same as this earthly birth puts you in relation 
to the earthly father, and it will do for you all 
and infinitely more along that same paternal 
line. The first thing it will do is, it will give 
you a name you never had before, just as soon 
as you are born into that higher life; as soon as 
the process, called here "the new birth" has 
been passed through by you, where you have 
another father and mother, God, the great in- 
visible Being. You do not see Him with these 
natural eyes, but you see Him with the eyes of 
the spirit; you see Him by faith. And he be- 
comes your father in the spirit, and in that 
sense he says he gives you another nature. 
These earthly parents give you a name, which 
is worth a great deal, if they are respectable 
people, which gives you your place in society 
and all the possibilities of life. But this heav- 
enly Father gives you a name, and what a name 



208 The Witness of Jesus 

that is! One of those writers in the New Tes- 
tament tells us that there is not an angel in 
heaven who would not love to have it; no angel 
so bright or so beautiful in all the presence of 
the infinite God himself that has a name like 
this which you are wearing. He sent into this 
world this very One who is talking to you; He 
sent His only begotten Son, who says, when 
this change is passed over you — then you will 
have his name — a name more honored — says 
one of these divine writers — than any in the 
universe. You get that by this new birth. 
And you get a home, another home. We do 
not realize that we get a home. I have a 
place, a house, rooms, everything, where my 
children live. They call that home. I have 
another place where are the hearts of God's 
people, and where we will live and that, I am 
sure, is home. All over this earth, go where 
you will, and when you find anyone with the 
name you are wearing, he is your brother. Just 
think of it! Go where you will, all over 
this planet, in any land beneath the sun, and 
find a man or woman with the name of Christ ; 
you have found somebody from home. You 
have found one of the family; and when you 
find one of the family you are at home. 

I have stopped here to say all I will say on 
that subject; and I have wanted to say a good 
many times, that there is but one name known 



The New Birth 209 

among men or angels that is a universal name; 
there is but one name in the whole category 
of the world's opinion that is so powerful, only 
one. There are good names and great names, 
and good people wear them, but there is but 
one name in the universe that is a nonpartisan, 
nonsectarian name; and you may go into any 
church in the world and ask any member and 
he will tell you that he claims the name of 
Christ. The only nonpartisan name in exist- 
ence is the name Christian. You may search 
the dictionaries of the earth, in all the lan- 
guages in it, and you cannot find a name worn 
by anybody on earth, that is a nonpartisan 
name, that is a universal name, that has no 
wall of separation in it between you and any- 
body else, but ,the name of Christ; and that is 
the name you get when you go into the family 
of God. My name here, and that of my chil- 
dren, makes a distinction between me and my 
children, and you and your children ; makes a 
difference in the feeling, very often. We have 
all these divisions, but God wants, and I want 
all my children to have the same name. I want 
all of yours to have the same name. That 
great infinite Father of everlasting love wants 
his children to have a name like that, that 
when it is called, the whole universe may 
respond, and they respond like the children do 

because they have love for the father and 
14 



210 The Witness of Jesus 

mother from whom they get it. And the fa- 
ther says: "When you get capable, when you 
have been educated, when you come to man- 
hood and womanhood, we will divide up all the 
property and put it in your hands." God the 
everlasting Father has said He is going to 
do that. "I will give you what you can take 
now, just as fast as you can take it, but the 
time will come when the whole riches of this 
universe will be freely given to you." God 
will divide it up. Now, he says to Nicodemus, 
you cannot see that, and he can say it to us. 
But it is true; and just exactly the experience 
that every Christian man has, if he has been 
brought into this new relationship; if he has been 
born of the Spirit, and is spirit, for he has a 
name that the angels cannot have. And God 
is feeding you, just as fast as you can take it 
and enjoy it. That is your relation to the 
heavenly things; that is why the heavenly side 
of your nature should be active. Jesus looks 
at that. You do not leave this earth to get 
your heavenly nature; that is in you; this soul 
or spirit is in you. Standing in this relation- 
ship, these are the eventualities, and we just 
get a little more and more. In all these rela- 
tionships I have come up to be a man. If you 
do not look at the conversation with Nicodemus 
in this broad way, if you narrow it down, and 
try to get out of it an explanation, you theorize, 



The New Birth 211 

and pass like the wind of winter over it, and 
mystify it and what a little thing is made out! 
But He is no narrow specialist. He gives you 
this wide conception of your relation to the 
earth and heaven. That side of your life is the 
earthly, the other side of your life is the heav- 
enly. This heavenly relationship you get from 
this heavenly birth, — the opening of the eyes 
of the soul and seeing God, — this great Teach- 
er teaching us, till we can see the kingdom of 
God. Jesus gives us his use of the word king- 
dom. We know that so far as our earthly re- 
lationship is concerned, the earth has ex- 
plained many doubtful things, and they have 
a sway in the kingdom of the earth; now we 
know, so far as the spiritual side of our 
nature is concerned, there are other forces, 
forces of love, forces of light, forces of truth, 
coming out of the men of God, swaying the 
spirit — that is the heavenly kingdom. This 
kingdom, he says, he cannot explain; he is try- 
ing to show us that there are people that can- 
not see it, and that cannot believe it. That 
kind of nature entitled it to that conception. 
He is again holding before us the New Testa- 
ment idea of man, in the dignity and greatness 
with which God hath made him ; that these two 
sets of relations, even the earthly one, are 
sometimes great, sometimes perfected, some- 
times degraded; but that by these heavenly 



212 The Witness of Jesus 

relations man is sustaining here, he is building 
up an opening, getting into a larger and more 
intense activity, as he walks over this world, 
into higher relations to the heavenly things, 
swayed more and more by the power that 
comes down from God. This is a man as Christ 
sees him; this is a man as He would have him 
enter into the fullness of the realization of the 
eternal inheritance about which these epistles 
tell us; if we are to enter in like the children 
into our homes. And we are getting nearer to 
this inheritance. After awhile, when we get 
old enough and large enough, God will give us 
the whole of the estate, and say, "Just take 
it and enjoy it. It belonged to you from the 
beginning." These were the "heavenly 
things," the Lord Jesus is so anxious to give to 
you, to all, to-day and always. 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

In harmony with the new relationships I 
spoke to you about, when we get into this 
heavenly family we want to be made conscious 
of that relationship, as much as we can, and 
that is the meaning of this ordinance that you 
have looked at so often. Right along in this 
same connection, when Jesus came to it he said, 
"God so loved the world that he gave his only 



The New Birth 213 

begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him 
should not perish but have everlasting life." 
He then takes the figure out of Mosaic history. 
As the serpent was lifted up in the wilderness, 
so will the Son of man be lifted up. And we 
are looking at this lifted up Son of man to-day, 
who came not to condemn the world, but that 
the world might be saved. The Son of man, 
and all the sons of men wanted lifting up, and 
God could lift them up by the power of his 
love; that love brought us into his blessed fel- 
lowship; we are made conscious of it. As we 
look to-day at the uplifting of the Son of man, 
and feel ourselves in spirit drawn toward Him, 
then we become conscious of this new relation- 
ship; this fellowship of God's children. This 
is a blessed association on earth, but it is heav- 
enly; it is one of the heavenly things about 
which Jesus is talking, and we can understand 
Him. Let us thank God for this opportunity. 

PRAYER. 

We thank Thee, infinite Father, that we are 
here again in the presence of these symbols. 
We thank Thee and adore Thee for the thought 
to us of Thy love. We thank Thee for the 
vision of the uplifted Son of man; we thank thee 
that thou hast made our hearts to know, by our 
believing on him. We thank Thee for the 
sweet hopes that come to us in those high and 
heavenly relations of the inheritance incor- 



214 The Witness of Jesus 

ruptible and undefiled and that cannot fade 
away. Take our hearts and minds, O God, 
that we may have a better, more realizing and 
glorious vision of these splendid gifts of Thy 
grace. O God, we beseech Thee to sanctify us 
wholly, and help us to live to Thy glory, while 
we are living here in the flesh, and at last bring 
us into the everlasting enjoyment of the eternal 
inheritance of the saints in light, and to Thy 
name we shall give all the praise, through 
Jesus, now and forever. Amen! 



XII 
AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 

And it came to pass that on one of those days, as he 
taught the people in the temple, and preached the gospel, 
the chief priests and the scribes came upon him with the 
elders. And spake unto him saying, Tell us by what au- 
thority doest thou these things? And who is he that gave 
thee this authority? And he answered and said unto them, 
I will also ask you one thing; and answer me; The baptism 
of John, was it from heaven or of men? And they reasoned 
with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he 
will say, Why then believed ye him not? But and if we 
say, Of men; all the people will stone us, for they be per- 
suaded that John was a prophet. And they answered that 
they could not tell whence it was. And Jesus said unto 
them, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these 
things. — Luke 20: 1-8. 

The words in this account which constitute 
the text for our consideration to-day are, "By 
what authority doest thou these things? And 
who is he that gave thee this authority?" I 
wish to call your attention, as well as I can, to 
the nature of the authority of the Christian re- 
ligion. There is no word in the world, in the 
history of Christianity, about which there has 
been deeper interest and more confusion than 
this; and the confusion of mind in regard to it 
is very far from being cleared up yet; and it 
may take some generations of growth and 
progress in all the churches that I know of, to 
reach what I conceive to be one of the peculiar 

thoughts that came to the world in the mind of 

215 



216 The Witness of Jesus 

Jesus of Nazareth. I will say here, that the 
conception, as I understand it, of authority 
which he has given in giving us the Christian 
religion, is a new thing. It was something 
which the human mind, at the time it was giv- 
en, was wholly inadequate to form any just 
conception of, and with centuries of growth 
and progress and advance we are just getting 
an insight of it now. It is such views of the 
teachings of Jesus that seem to us so high in 
our admiration and our worship. Authority 
was easily enough understood in all the early 
days of human history when embodied in a 
government or when placed or personified in 
some chief, in some king, or in some one who 
had the right to use force to make the people 
obey. I do not know any shorter definition of my 
conception of the meaning of the word authority 
than to say that it is the right to the use of 
power. The word which is rendered authority 
here, in the Greek is very often rendered by the 
word power, and even the translators who gave 
us the version here before us and every other 
version that we have yet, have failed to make 
the distinction which it seems to me ought to 
have been made between the two thoughts, the 
two conceptions of power and authority. To 
place authority in the hands of human beings 
is an immense trust on the part of Him from 
whom all human authority comes; all authority 



Authority in Religion 217 

comes from God. Sometimes it becomes a 
thing merely of men, as you see in the reply of 
Jesus in this case. That was the thought on 
which this controversy turns. People that have 
the old idea — and they have it yet — are very 
particular and very exacting as to the source 
whence you get your authority to do anything; 
and so it was with these Pharisees. They and 
the scribes and elders — all the heads of them — 
made one final effort by coming in a body to 
Jesus, as he was preaching the gospel to the 
people; and they put to him the direct ques- 
tion, "By what authority are you doing this?" 
That is the sole thought they had. 

Now every one can see very readily the as- 
sumption underlying that question in the or- 
ganism in which they believed? All rightful 
authority they thought rested in themselves — 
the priests, Pharisees, scribes — the heads of the 
Jewish church. They held their commission — 
so they claimed — in a direct line of succession 
from Moses. But it had been broken a great 
many times, like all other direct successions. 
They claimed that they sat in Moses' seat; they 
were the legitimate descendants of the law- 
giver himself, and had right and authority to 
teach the people, to say what the people should 
be taught, what the people should understand, 
believe and do; this all rested with them. And 
here comes an outsider — a man who fails to 



218 The Witness of Jesus 

recognize them, and who does not go to them 
and ask their permission if he shall say what is 
in him. He thus gave them great offense. 
They were scandalized that any man, whatever 
his pretensions might be in the world, should 
stand up among their people, the people that 
belonged to them, and presume to teach them 
something religious, and they say, "By what 
authority do you this? give us your author- 
ity." You see the position they have taken. 
That position is similar to one that has pre- 
vailed ever since, in all the historic churches. 
The elder churches in the world hold that pre- 
tension to-day. You take the great church of 
Rome — as honest as any other church in the 
world — and they believe just as honestly as did 
these men that they have the right to say what 
the people shall be taught. They do not be- 
lieve, not one of them, that I have any author- 
ity, or any other Protestant minister, in the 
world; and they say to us now, as they have 
said to us for centuries, "Who gave you this 
authority?" They say, "This man, who is the 
head of our authority, is God's vicegerent on 
earth, and the authority connected with him 
has this divine, infallible connection with the 
divine mind." They claim that they own the 
knowledge of the truth, and that all men who 
get truth ought to get it from them; and they 
say this without any hesitation, because they 



Authority in Religion 219 

are honest in their convictions. They say, 
"Not a man of you has the least right to per- 
form a marriage ceremony, or administer the 
ordinance of baptism." It has not been a week 
since I saw that exemplified. It was precisely 
the same position, showing the confusion that 
resulted. In the Church of England, you will 
see it is just the same, as you listen to the con- 
troversy between it and the Church of Rome^ 
Each of them says, "We have the true succes- 
sion; the succession has come down regularly 
from Jerusalem by the touched hands of our 
bishops; and we cannot recognize any man 
which they do not; we do not recognize the 
right or the authority of any man to teach re- 
ligion unless he has had the hands of one of 
the bishops upon him." 

These are old questions, very large questions, 
and they have their root in the tendencies of 
human nature itself; they are grounded in the 
mental habits that have been fixed and in- 
trenched for ages. All I shall attempt to do is 
to place before you the attitude of Jesus of 
Nazareth to that question. In doing this He 
gives us his own conception of what authority 
is, and the sources of religion. It had not yet 
taken its place in the world's thought. When 
the world, the church and the teachers of re- 
ligion get to be great enough to take in the 
thought of Jesus, we shall get rid of all this 



220 The Witness of Jesus 

foolishness about getting authority from the 
touch of the fingers of somebody. I shall try 
to show you how. 

Jesus says, this authority is either from heav- 
en or of men. Here is a man — John the Bap- 
tist — who has come before you as a divine 
teacher. The public recognized him as a di- 
vine teacher; people went and accepted in 
multitudes his ministrations. He did that 
under the very observation and eyes of the 
church. "Now then," said he, "where did he 
get his authority — from heaven or of men?" 
They were afraid to answer. "If we say from 
heaven, He will ask us why we do not take 
it." John himself tells us that they rejected 
the whole counsel of God against themselves, 
not being baptized with the baptism of John. 
"Yet, if we say, this is of men, then such a 
vast multitude accepted John's teachings that 
they will stone us." He left it just there, but 
the inference is not difficult at all. Now I 
have just a little time to look into the situation 
of the thing as it stands here, for the thought 
that I shall try to give you. Here is an organ- 
ism, a religious organism, a religious organiza- 
tion that, somehow, they conceived, conferred 
the authority to teach truth. Either that or- 
ganism had its authority of man or of heaven; 
if it is of heaven then it is from above. This 
is the attitude in which we stand. 



Authority in Religion 221 

Now in regard to the reason for the author- 
ity, let me call your attention to that. The 
right and authority for any organism to teach, 
the right for any organism to exist, the right 
for any church to exist, whether the Jewish, 
the Catholic or the Protestant, the right for 
any government to exist, of whatever kind it 
may be, in any part of the world, rests on the 
needs of the human race. I want to place that 
before your thought, and then we will under- 
stand the teaching of Jesus. The thing God 
has in view forever in the whole formation of 
the planet we live on and everything upon it, 
whatever it may be, from the beginning to the 
end, from the bottom to the top, is the soul of 
man and its needs. You can understand that 
very readily if we look simply at political so- 
ciety. Man needs justice, and the right for 
any government to exist in the world simply 
rests on the ground that it becomes an instru- 
ment through which he can get justice. That 
has been the reason for the existence of any 
government in the world. I need justice; I 
need a right to my home, a right to myself, a 
right to my time, a right to my price of labor. 
I need some way by which these can be secured 
to me in order that I can live and rear my fam- 
ily and develop myself and be something in the 
world. I need to have justice and I need to 
have it secured to me; and I need an organism 



222 The Witness of Jesus 

that will give me that guarantee. That is the 
reason for the existence of government, and 
there is no other reason than this fundamental 
reason. Of course there may be a great many 
side reasons that branch out from these, but I 
am looking at the fundamental ground of the 
thing. You take a civil organism, and as long 
as it is simply an instrument by which truth 
and right are measured out to each individual, 
it has the right to exist; and it does exist and 
grows strong and it holds its own in the world. 
When the organism ceases to do that; when the 
organism ceases to become the instrument of 
justice to the individual members of the soci- 
ety; when those who have charge of the organ- 
ism begin to run it for themselves; when the 
conception comes to them that all this organ- 
ism exists for us, and the people are below us 
and must look up to us and minister to us, then 
the authority that God has given civil govern- 
ment ceases to be from heaven and is simply 
of man. And God has given to the souls of 
men, in that condition of affairs, the right to 
revolutionize and turn that government over 
and make one that will give them justice. The 
right of revolution is simply based on this fun- 
damental, primary need of the human soul, just 
as in the case of our ancestors, when England 
had a government here. If it had been the in- 
strument of justice, and secured all rights and 



Authority in Religion 223 

privileges towards each individual, it would 
have gone on to this day. There would have 
been no interruption. But when it ceased to 
be the instrument of justice to the colonies, 
they protested, and made a clear statement of 
their grievances. They said, "We are not be- 
ing dealt with justly; our rights are not being 
regarded; your government of Great Britain is 
not securing that for which your government is 
organized;" and they appealed to the king; and 
they appealed to the government, a long time, 
to change the administration so that each indi- 
vidual could have justice. And when their 
appeals ceased to be heard, then we have the 
Declaration of Independence. These men said, 
a government exists, but justice must be given 
to individuals. If this one refuses to do that 
we wall push it aside and make one that will. 
That is the reason why there is this American 
Government. You can see the reason why I 
said a political organism has a right to exist, 
simply that individuals may have justice; God 
looks at that in establishing governments. 

Now, man has another need; he has a higher 
one than this. A man needs truth, and has a 
right to it. He needs all truth, divine truth, 
spiritual truth. When God made the mind and 
correlated it to truth He put in it the inher- 
ent right to know all truth, and it needs that 
truth, and has a right to have it. And we 



224 The Witness of Jesus 

need an organism by which truth can be ad- 
ministered to the human mind; that is the only 
reason for the existence of the church. Here 
was the old Jewish church. It was a crude 
arrangement; sort of a state and sort of a 
church, but fitted to convey to the thought and 
to the heart of each subject of it the truth 
about God — the truth about human life; the 
truth about the great Father of mankind. That 
is what it was put there for. And here, at 
last, is the embodiment of that truth. It has 
made its appearance in the world in the form 
of a Person, in connection with his existence; 
and in connection with such existence, they 
absolutely reject it with contempt. What does 
that prove? The organism that was meant to 
teach the idea-=-to hold up the lamp of God's 
infinite truth to the eyes of the human soul to 
illuminate it through the ages, has lost sight of 
that, and the whole importance is given to the 
organism itself! They said, we can illuminate, 
and we only; and if you are going to get any- 
body to do that, you must get authority from 
us! God's conception of its purpose is lost, 
namely: to supply the need of the human soul, 
by teaching it right and truth, that belongs to 
it, and for which it was made. You are here 
to teach that, and if you cease to teach that 
and simply make this whole thing depend upon 
the strength, perfection and power of your or- 



Authority in Religion 225 

ganism, your authority is from man alone, and 
ceases to be from God. 

That is the conception we have here. Now 
the idea of Jesus Christ, which is to me so 
original, so absolutely divine in its origin, that 
we fail to get hold of it to this day, is^ that the 
authority is in the truth, and not in the organ- 
ism. The organism is simply a means to an 
end. The organism in itself and for itself has 
no authority whatever; it is the divine truth 
which God had given it to teach that gives it 
power. This is its right to exist and its right 
to act. But we have not reached that yet. 
We have not reached up high enough. It is 
the idea of this great Teacher, the Nazarene, 
that we have not yet been able to appreciate. 
Let me make a general statement — I wish I had 
the time to make a sermon on it. There is 
not an organism of any kind on the earth, nev- 
er was, and never will be, that exists for itself 
— simply for itself. The right of every kind of 
organism in the universe to exist is for some- 
thing above itself. I do not care if you go to 
a rock; you may go to the geological history 
of these rocks, but they were not made simply 
that they might be rocks; the earth needed 
them. They enrich the soil, form strength to 
the earth's crust; it is something above itself. 
And after awhile man was going to come and 

he would need it, in all the great functions of 
15 



226 The Witness of Jesus 

life, in the structures he would rear. It didn't 
exist to be a rock, but for something above itself. 
There is not a plant that exists just to be a 
plant. Your rose bush does not exist to be a 
rose bush. It has no right to exist and you 
would not allow it to exist on your place for 
that. But God has given you the love of the 
beautiful, and it exists that it may minister to 
something in you. You cannot think of an or- 
ganism of any sort in the organic world, in the 
vegetable world, in the animal world — that exists 
for itself. A horse does not exist to be a horse. 
He has a higher use than himself, and so with 
everything else you can think of. God made this 
universe to look upward. He intended that as 
the eyes of man looked upon every organism on 
it, they should see that need of looking up to 
something above itself. My body is an organ- 
ism; yours is another; but this body does not 
exist simply as a body; it cannot exist for that; 
it has no right to exist for a reason like that. 
There is a tenant in it that needs it, that is 
above it. It exists for something better. And 
if you think of the soul itself, you will see that 
it is an organism that does not exist simply to 
be a soul, something that has sensation, and 
will, working according to all that marvelous, 
mysterious set of laws, according to which it 
works, but for God above it. There is not a 
thing in this world that has a right to exist for 



Authority in Religion 227 

itself. But that was the idea that the Jews 
had about their church. That was the idea 
that the ancients had about their governments. 
When a man got to be a king of Syria, Baby- 
lon, Persia or Greece, he thought that every- 
thing existed for him. When Rome existed 
everything after awhile had to be for Csesar. 
When the church was organized it was not 
long before it conceived the idea that all the 
nations were subject to the bishop of Rome, and 
it has been running that way a good deal since. 
But that is going out; and if it does not get any 
higher idea than it has now it will cease to ex- 
ist. Churches have come and gone just like 
individuals have, and they will come and go 
when their mission is lost in that way. 

Now let me call your attention just' briefly 
to this new idea, this divine, this great Christ- 
idea, that authority is in truth. It is in truth, 
because the human mind has a right to divine 
truth. And whenever a man is in possession 
of this truth, that gives him a right to tell it; 
that is the conception of Christ. The succes- 
sion and the only succession that is worth hav- 
ing in all the history of this planet is the 
succession of truth. Here is a man from Gali- 
lee, teaching. There is an organism with, its 
preachers, and in its hand a divine charter 
that came from God originally; and these men 
can show it to you, and it came to them from 



228 The Witness of Jesus 

high priests who have succeeded one another 
away down in the succession unbroken to their 
time, and they stand there before Him and say, 
"What right have you to do this? 1 ' He says, 
"It is from heaven; this gospel, this message of 
gladness; the world's heart needs that, and I 
have come to tell it. It came from God." 
This is Christ's idea. I wish I could make it 
clearer, but I cannot. Any man in this world 
that has in him the truth that the world needs is 
sent from God. The very truth entering the mind 
and heart is God's method and God's way. The 
old prophets understood it that way and all 
modern prophets understand it that way. I 
put Him in my heart, and I have some new 
views of God, higher and better than the world 
has had; some new conception of the great 
things of humanity. That is God's voice in 
the mind, saying, as much as the commission 
of Jesus said to these men, "Go and teach." 
When he sent twelve men to go all over the 
world, He said, "Go and teach the truth" — 
the truth revealed to them. That is what men 
need. That is your mission, and your author- 
ity for that. He put it there and it is there 
yet. We are having in the world an idea that 
a church organization has a vast amount of au- 
thority. We have the elders and we have the 
priests and we have the whole corps of officers; 
and we say we are authorized; we have the au- 

i 



Authority in Religion 229 

thority all imbedded in us. If these are instru- 
ments to give truth and right to the people, 
why then they have the authority; but it is 
only that way; only in trust. That is all. 

Now we have an idea that the truth is to 
have something else behind it; something to 
enforce it. It only needs to be told, to be made 
plain; to let the soul see it and know it as 
truth; that is enough. But some think it needs 
some kind of absolute authority to command 
the human mind to accept it. But Jesus had a 
higher idea than that. His idea is that authority 
is in the truth, and in the soul of man. I want 
to say this. You may think I am wroug — a 
great many do — but when the clear truth of 
God is placed before the eye of the soul, and 
the soul of man recognizes that and sees it as 
true, He cannot add to it. It has all the right 
God has to be believed, and the soul has all the 
right God can give it to believe that truth; and 
there is no statute from God, or man, or devil, 
that can add to its authority. It has authority 
within itself. It has an infinite right to be be- • 
lieved because it is truth. A man has a God- 
given right to believe it because he was made 
to know and love truth. 

We do not understand that yet. Somehow 
when we get truth we have to get somebody to 
force us to take it. Jesus looks at man as 
something higher and better. When you take 



230 The Witness of Jesus 

the question of the great moral law; when he 
shows me my relation to God; when he shows 
me a thing that is right in itself; when my con- 
science shows the thing to be right, the author- 
ity to command me is in the righteousness of 
the thing, and you may add to it all the statutes 
God himself has made, and it does not add one 
thing to its authority; the conscience of man is 
enough. And when that right is shown to it; 
when the conscience sees it to be such, when it 
knows it to be such, you cannot add any au- 
thority. It is the authority of God; it has all 
the right to be done and all the right to com- 
mand, and the soul has the right to it, and you 
cannot add to its authority. That is the con- 
ception, as I understand, of Jesus, so different 
from the world. 

When you come to the Jewish law and the 
world's childhood, then you have a statute for 
everything. There was a commandment for 
every duty, just like there is for your little 
child, because the child does not see the right, 
but you can see it and you are training it to 
obedience. That is all. -That is the reason 
they had a statute in their childhood — they 
were not able to see the right thing and feel its 
power. Therefore you have the statute, "Thou 
shaltnot" and "Thou shalt." But when the 
world had grown to be 21, and had power to 
see the right for itself, all that was needed 



Authority in Religion 231 

was just to lay that before it and leave it there. 
You cannot add to that authority at all. It is so 
hard now to get the people, and the preachers — 
I am talking about my brethren as much as 
anybody else — to understand this as the genius 
of Christianity. Twenty or thirty years ago in 
the presence of a collection of ministers I made 
this statement; I had this thought then; it had 
just come to me and it was new. I said that 
there was not a "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt 
not" in all the New Testament, and I think 
God does not command us like he does in the 
Old Testament, to do anything. No man is 
commanded to believe, to repent; nor is there a 
command to any human being to be baptized; 
not one. You cannot find the simplest com- 
mand, even in regard to the first day of the 
week. You cannot find anything like a com- 
mand from Jesus or an appeal, to observe the 
Lord's Supper every Sunday. Why such a 
change as this? Because the whole adminis- 
tration changed, and the world's life was placed 
on that high platform of right and truth. "He 
that believeth." All you have to do is to be- 
lieve. God does not do that for you. He will 
help you to see it, but you have to believe 
and to do. If He sees that you are wrong in 
your heart, then you have got to repent. It is 
no use to command it; that would not do any 
good if He did. You are baptized in the indie- 



232 The Witness of Jesus 

ative mood; you assent voluntarily, that it is 
your own act. Nobody commanded you to be 
baptized, or to baptize anybody. I know the ex- 
pression in the Acts, at the house of Cornelius; 
and that is sometimes pleaded, when the Holy 
Spirit came and these people believed, and they 
were "commanded to be baptized in the name 
of the Lord Jesus." But every Greek scholar 
knows the correct form is that he gave com- 
mandment to his assistants to baptize them. 
It was then given to them; they were ready to 
be baptized. He simply gave instructions to 
his assistants to baptize them. When you 
think of a religion like this it means manhood. 
I w r ish w r e could get the conception of this glo- 
rious, blessed Nazarene in looking at truth and 
looking at right; recognizing the divine author- 
ity in truth and all divine authority in right, 
and voluntarily receiving the truth and obey- 
ing the right. That makes a man; that is the 
idea of Jesus. You make a church, an organ- 
ization, you invest it with authority by organ- 
izing a peculiar priesthood, and then say you 
can order the people to do this or that. What 
sort of a character does that make? That has 
thrown the world back into its childhood; it 
goes back 2000 years. The Lord Jesus w r ants 
us to look up like the universe looks up, like 
everything God has made from the lowest or- 
ganism in it, from the grain of sand to the 



Authority in Religion 233 

greatest structures. There is not one of these 
that does not exist for something besides itself. 
The look of the whole universe is upward, and 
when God's truth comes down and opens the 
human eye, it is right, and God himself has a 
right to be believed by that soul. When the 
whole relation of God to a man's conscience to 
obey him and to follow him is placed before 
the human heart, it is invested with authority, 
and God is to be obeyed. The soul recognizes 
this right and does obey, and it is voluntary 
submission to conscience. 

This is my idea of the Christian life, the 
Christian manhood — Christian character. How 
are we going to get ready for heaven in any 
other way? What have we this book for — the 
light of the New Testament? God opens the 
door of that spiritual world. He allows your 
soul to enter into this house, this palace, this 
structure — the wealth of the everlasting Father 
— so that you may enjoy it. What sort of a 
heaven would it be, if you were to get it by 
some priest or bishop? When the soul of man 
is educated, lifted up and perfected, to see and 
know right, then it is born into the glorious 
liberty of the children of God. Thus you be- 
come heirs of the universe, because you are 
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. 



234 The Witness of Jesus 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

I think our religion is so joyful and happy 
because it is voluntary. It seems to me that 
every member of the church here to-day will 
feel and say, "Why here, this is my right be- 
cause I am one of the children of God. I do this 
because I want to do it. That is all the reason 
why I do this, because I see light and love in 
it. Jesus has shown me the truth — a simple 
and glorious view of the great Father's heart, 
and I want to enjoy it with all his other children; 
that makes it a joyful thing, a blessed thing. 
The reason for its existence is not simply to be 
a communion. We do not make this bread to 
be bread, and wine to be wine, and the table to 
be a table. You see how foolish that would be. 
But we make them for something so high; it is 
so simple, but how high does it lift us up? 
That is the true object to which the eye of the 
soul is turned, the glorious vision of the Father 
of love. This is for every child of God that 
loves Him and worships Him voluntarily. To 
me it is so beautiful, so lovely. 



XIII 
THE COMING OF THE PERFECT 

When that which is perfect is come, then that which is 
in part shall be done away. — / Cor. 13:10. 

I rkad in the opening service this old and 
beautiful song — more like a song than any- 
thing else — a song of the heart — the 13th of 
the 1st Corinthians. I call your attention to 
these words as the basis of what I am to say to 
you to-day: "When that which is perfect is 
come." 

The first impression which these words make 
on my mind when I read them, is that they are 
describing a class of things that have no exist- 
ence on this planet. We have never seen, or 
heard, or known, in our experience, a perfect 
thing. And yet, it is one of the most remark- 
able, interesting, and, I will say, sublime facts 
in our thought, that we believe, all of us, in 
perfection, and we have an idea of some kind 
of perfection. I think it is evident that we did 
not originate that conception. It was not born 
in man — that divinity or infinity. I give you 
my conception, imperfect as it may be, of how 
that thought came to us. No man could have 
given us the concept. Does it not strike you 

as wonderful that everv human being believes 
235 



236 The Witness of Jesus 

in the perfect, and yet no one ever saw it, 
heard it, or knew it? The world we live in is 
an imperfect world and everything that lives on 
it is imperfect, from man down. I think we 
are conscious of this. It looks to some people 
like irreverence, to say that God's world which 
He made is not perfect. I think the world that 
He made is just as He meant it to be; that He 
did not mean it to be perfect; and that man, as 
he lives on it, in all the stages of its progress, 
is adapted to that kind of a world. It must be 
evident to you that if this were a perfect world 
we would be very poorly qualified to live in it. 
We are so finite and imperfect, what would we 
do, in our present state, in a perfect world? 
And if we were perfect ourselves, in our pow- 
ers and thoughts and faculties, perfect as we 
conceive a perfect man, after having studied 
the Christian idea of perfection of manhood, 
what kind of a life would we live in a world 
like this? You can see that neither the world 
nor the men that live on it are perfect. There 
is one thing we can say, and that is, that they 
are perfectly adapted to each other. You hear 
men say, wherever they live on this earth — any 
geographical section of it — that it should be 
changed. It is just a little too dry, if you live 
in Kansas; you go somewhere else, and it is a 
little too wet; you go somewhere else and it is 
a little too cold; and elsewhere it is a little too 



The Coming of the Perfect 237 

hot. And you take the years as they come, 
and men say, we are doing very badly; the 
growth has not developed at all; the crops are 
backward. Others will say, it is just like other 
years. They differ very much; some are more 
nearly perfect than others. I felt very much 
inclined to say, last week, when we had two or 
three lovely days, this is a perfect day, but I 
meant it in a relative sense; with my poor con- 
ception I could not tell how to make it any 
more delightful and pleasant. But there is 
nothing perfect. 

Here is this side of the human heart that the 
great apostle has expressed, as he looked at the 
higher side of the Christian life, and compared 
the two forms of living and dying that he pre- 
sents here in contrast to one another — "when 
that which is perfect is come." It is the ever- 
lasting side of the human heart. 

Note the restlessness of the age. We have 
the laboring man on the one side, the capital- 
ist on the other side, the mechanic here and 
the farmer there. Note their unrest; and if 
you put their groanings and their complaints, 
their discomforts and their disadvantages to- 
gether, all that they feel about it, it just means 
that the perfect has not yet come. You might 
sum up that whole side of human experience, 
and you could not embody it more perfectly 
than the apostle has done when he says: 



238 The Witness of Jesus 

4 'When that which is perfect is come, that 
which is in part shall be done away." We 
can see, therefore, that it is true when applied 
to every side of life. 

The very earth we live on and the forms of 
life that are adapted to that earth are imper- 
fect. If we get higher up, no matter how 
high we go, we find we have the same ex- 
perience and the same thought. We never saw 
a perfect man or a perfect woman. I have 
seen a few people in the world that I loved 
so much that I could not see any fault in 
them. I know some people that I cannot see 
any faults in, and I say, relatively they are per- 
fect. I know they have weak places, like 
others. We have never seen even a perfect 
human body. If you want to see something of 
that kind you have got to pay your expenses 
across the ocean and look at the work of the 
chisel of some great sculptor in marble, or the 
picture of some great artist on canvas. Men 
are doing this every year. They want to see a 
perfect human form, and they go to see the 
Apollo Belvidere, or some touch of the brush 
of some mighty genius where a perfect form is 
presented. I have not seen them. They may 
be beautiful, but I never saw a human being in 
my life that exactly satisfied me. The reason 
is, we think of these beings as they ought to 
be. 



The Coming of the Perfect 239 

We have an idea of the perfect. We think 
of days, months and years and seasons as they 
ought to be to us and they do not come up to 
our standard, and that is the reason they are 
not perfect. That is the way we think of our 
bodies. You never saw a gentleman or lady 
who would not like to be modified. Some are 
not as tall as they would like to be; some are a 
little taller. Some would like to change the 
color of their eyes; others would like to change 
their complexion. Many try to fill out and make 
the proportions perfect. I never saw anybody 
in my life that would not like to change him- 
self or herself just a little. This means that 
we have not seen the perfect one. But we 
have an idea that we would like to get to it. 
And it is just that same feeling coming out 
when it is said, — "when that which is perfect 
is come." It has not come yet. This is the 
utterance that is given to us here. It is full of 
divine suggestion. 

I said a little while ago that love makes us 
see imperfectly; but sometimes it sharpens the 
intellect more than anything else. It ought to. 
You take a parent's love for a child. Take 
that boy that is growing up and the heart of 
the parent sometimes worships him; and you 
talk with any mother or father and they will 
say, "If he were not quite so easily influenced.' ' 
That is the first thing. "If I can just get him 



240 The Witness of Jesus 

to do this or that; if he would devote himself to 
his studies, and have a little more ambition." 
They can say a great many beautiful things and 
true things, but they say "I would like it if he 
could be" — something else. So with the other 
children. Take the daughter, growing up in 
your home, whom you idolize, and you idealize 
before you know it. But presently you hear 
the mother say, "If she would not take cold so 
easily; something in the constitution," etc. 
Something like this always comes up, wherever 
you look, wherever the attention rests. Wher- 
ever you think and there is any heart in 
thought, Paul's words are underlying that 
thought and that heart, and you say of the uni- 
verse, that which is perfect has not come — 
"when that which is perfect is come." We all 
notice this, and that is why it presents to us 
such a momentous view of human life. The 
apostle is applying it to the Christianity of his 
age, to the ways of thinking and living; and if 
it is applicable to that day it is applicable to 
every other day. Paul was a man who had 
seen all the sides and phases of religious life 
which were then in the world. He had been 
reared in a Greek city, where there were cul- 
ture and the best forms of Greek life. He had 
been educated at Jerusalem under the great 
masters of Jewish thought. He understood all 
that was highest and best in the Hebrew life. 



The Coming of the Perfect 241 

Later in life he had been converted to Chris- 
tianity and sent on a special mission, having 
unfolded to his mind, as we can see when 
we read these books, the widest and highest 
conception of God and the religion of Jesus 
Christ which any man on earth had. And yet 
he said, "We know in part, and we prophesy, 
or teach, in part." That is all he could say 
about himself. He looks out upon a universe 
of infinite magnitude and says, we can only see 
in part. All these phases of life that you at- 
tach such vast importance to, are temporary. 
They are simply means to an end, and when 
the end is gained, they drop away like the 
scaffolding of a house; we have no further use 
for them. People can attach a vast importance 
to them, as they do to the world of marvels and 
wonders. Even now a man comes along and 
makes something we never saw before, and how 
the human mind observes and wonders! They 
were expecting these men in those days to 
work marvels, or miracles, as they were called. 
He had described these in the 12th chapter of 
this epistle as "speaking with tongues, discern- 
ing spirits and working miracles;" and those 
things they attached immense importance to. 
They thought that was what was required, be- 
cause it was divine; they were nearer to God, 
then, they imagined, than they could be any- 
where else. If we could just see a man raised 
16 



242 The Witness of Jesus 

from the dead; a blind man with his eyes 
opened; some poor paralytic just by a word 
raised up to strength and health; then we 
would be so close to God. Paul says, that is 
all a mistake; I am going to show you that you 
might have all these things and be a mere 
"sounding brass and tinkling cymbal." God 
would not be near to you nor you near to Him. 
It is no wonder he began to think about the 
perfect when he began to talk that way. There 
is a life and the best of a life, and there is ex- 
perience and a reason for that experience, that 
lifts it beyond all miracles and wonders, and 
tongues and languages that men or angels ever 
spoke. That is what Paul said. It is a marvel 
to me that we cannot rise high enough to see 
that. It is a marvel to me that honest men 
and women whom we have right here in our 
community still think it would be a great addi- 
tion and advantage to Christianity if men could 
work miracles and heal diseases; and should 
support such a religion as that. Paul tells us 
there is a way vastly above that. We want to 
get to the top; why not take the best way? 
Why not take the true way? Why not take 
this which he says will never pass away? Your 
former knowledge, and what you may be able 
to teach now, will pass away. That is contrary 
to all the beliefs in the world. You go to any 
church in the world to-day and you will find 



The Coming of the Perfect 243 

them equally honest, equally sincere. This 
one thinks this form of knowledge and truth is 
eternal and never can change. There is not a 
church in the world that does not think that. 
I do not mean that there are not men in all the 
churches that know better, but I am speaking 
of the mass. 

You have seen, if you have read the papers, 
a lesson of this. It strikes me with great force 
and I want to use it with great delicacy and 
respect for a great church and a great people 
that I honor for their piety and their work. 
Most of them are fine scholars and pure men. 
No one questions their ability. There is a man 
of a high Christian courage, of high character 
in that entire denomination, being tried now. 
And Dr. Briggs was not asked a single ques- 
tion as to whether what he said was true. So 
far, I do not know how it may come out. The 
question has not been raised with Prof. Smith, 
of Lane Seminary, — If this is true which we 
are considering. Is this true that you say 
about inspiration? That question has not been 
raised with Dr. Briggs. The simple question 
is, Does it agree with some statements that men 
signed as true in 1640? The whole question of 
inspiration was settled in the Confession of 
Faith, so made, and what you now say does 
not agree with what was then said. It does 
seem to me, and to many Christian hearts, as 



244 The Witness of Jesus 

we read these accounts, that somebody should 
ask, "Is this true that Dr. Briggs says?" 
not, "Does it agree with the Confession?" Is 
this thing which Prof. Lane says, true? We 
have an idea in our mind about truth, and here 
we are calling upon these great men, these ad- 
vanced men, and are asking them, "Do you 
agree with that form of knowledge that has 
passed away?" Paul says, all these forms of 
knowledge will pass away. 

Why, it is true in every department of life, 
and will be true as long as the human mind is 
what God made it. The same thing is true in 
the scientific world, as we have it in the re- 
ligious world. Precisely that. There was a 
time, and it is not hard to find it, when men 
looked at this earth as a plain parallelogram; 
when the sky and all that is in it was a crys- 
tallized firmament, and the stars in their setting 
give light to us. We go back to Egypt, when 
men were looking up to the heavens — the 
heavens as they are now; and they drew the 
promise of marvel and wonder as they understood 
it; and they were so convinced, and so held for 
several thousand years without change. That 
was their form of knowledge, and it sufficed 
for the life of the world very many centuries. 
Away down here in the Christian era, a man 
came and said, "You are mistaken about that; 
that form of knowledge is inadequate; it does 



The Coming of the Perfect 245 

not account for what you see there. We are 
not stationary, while the sun, moon and stars 
go around us, but the sun is the centre of the 
system, and all of us are going around it." 
That was another form of knowledge. I need 
not go into the sharp controversy by the church 
and the pope when they issued their edicts and 
bulls against it and commanded princes and 
everybody to oppose it because it was unscript- 
ural. It was the form of knowledge entertained 
by the most intelligent and best educated men 
in the world, who had a true knowledge of 
nature. But these men have passed away, 
like prophecy passed away, like all forms of 
knowledge pass. And then Copernicus came and 
told us about it. They were just as confident; 
and Kepler and two or three of them got their 
light and studied the sky again and made the 
sun the centre; made new maps of the sun and 
moon; went to the universe and studied the 
stars again, and it was all settled; they under- 
stood it. But after awhile somebody with a larger 
telescope came — L,ord Ross, for instance — looked 
at the sky, and Herschel said, "You don't see 
all that is there, nor anybody else. There are 
constellations through the whole galaxy of the 
glorious universe you do not dream of; there 
are movements and wonders you do not see." 
They opposed him, like they do everybody and 
everything, till after awhile men saw it; and 



246 The Witness of Jesus 

then they said, "Well, it is true." And now 
there is a telescope out here in California at 
Mount Hamilton larger by a good deal; and 
they are talking of making another one larger 
still. And men will look up through it and 
see the wonders and glories, the movements 
and mysteries, that men never dreamed about 
in the past. So it has been with geology; so 
it has been with botany; so it has been with 
every form of knowledge. If a man would 
take the text-book that I studied in chemistry 
forty years ago, he would find himself away 
behind the times. Nobody undertakes to teach 
that now. They would laugh at one if he did, 
from one end of the land to the other. There 
is not a man who would not say, "Why, that 
is not chemistry.' ' The whole thing has grown 
and developed so vastly that they would laugh 
at a man now. Yet I felt as confident that I 
knew chemistry as anybody feels now, when I 
graduated. 

I just speak of these things to show you in 
the best way what has taken place in religion. 
For a long time — over a thousand years — men 
thought that they knew everything. They 
were just as sure as they could be. They had 
settled the question and they had infallible 
truth; they had an infallible church. They 
had an infallible head of the church; they had 
an infallible teaching power; they understood 



The Coming of the Perfect 247 

it all. Infallible! What a word is that to use 
on this planet! As if there could be anything 
infallible that was human at all, whether it be 
church, or religion, or creed or anything else! 
But they thought so and they believed so. 
They had looked into the Scriptures like these 
old astronomers looked into the sky; they had 
seen something in the Scriptures and they put 
it down in the books and settled it. When 
Luther came he said, "Why, you don't know; 
there are truths that you do not apprehend at 
all. I am looking through a larger glass than 
you. When I look into this great unfolding of 
God's will — this history of His revelation of 
Himself to the world, I see things you do 
not see. I have just got a bigger telescope 
than you have." But the philosophers of the 
ages would not have anything to do with it; 
and when Luther looked at all the facts he 
took his view of religious truth, and wrote his 
statement down, and it is known in Germany 
to-day as the belief of a large part of the world. 
But it was not very long until Calvin said, 
"Why, Luther, you don't know it all; there are 
constellations of truth in that Book, and in the 
universe, that you have not dreamed of. I 
have got a better glass and see more than you 
did — vastly more than you did." The same 
experience then begins, and Luther fought him, 
and before it was settled a part of the human 



248 The Witness of Jesus 

race believed that Calvin was right. We had 
no more than got this settled when Wesley 
comes along and said, "I have a better glass 
than any of you. I see things that you do not 
any of you see, stars in the firmament of truth." 
These were new ways to live. He went around 
and they looked through his telescope. And 
when we get down to this century we have Mr. 
Campbell and Barton Stone and a few men who 
are looking through other telescopes. And 
they say, "Why, Calvin, Luther and Wesley, 
there is a great deal more that you do not see. 
There are fresh forms of truth. There are 
worlds and glorious galaxies that your glasses 
do not take in, I have got a larger glass. " 
They had the same experience of infidelity. 
But they went over the land till the people saw 
it in that way. This is what Paul means, 
when he says of our systems, that they pass 
away. We have got a class of people like the 
rest; we do not differ at all from other people 
in our human nature. 

If a man says, "Now I have got my glass 
more perfect in fifty years; I can see something 
Mr. Campbell did not see," we have got a 
number of people who will denounce him and 
give evidence of his infidelity. I have been 
called an infidel myself, for the matter of that. 
The idea that one man has seen all that God 
has to show to the human mind! The idea 



The Coming of the Perfect 249 

that one church in this world has seen and 
known all that God has to give to the world in 
all the eternal ages — that is childish. The 
idea that there is to be no more progress, no 
more growth, no more telescope! But, you say, 
what are you going to do with the Bible? 
Well, I am going to do with the Bible what 
Copernicus and Herschel and Kepler did with 
the sky; I am going to look into its sky and see 
its Milky Way, and all the constellations of the 
zodiac; I shall investigate its splendor all the 
time, and seek to go further and further into 
it. The Bible has been there all the time; it 
will be there when you and I are dead. There 
will be other eyes, when we have gone, thank 
God, that can see more in it than we now see. 
As for knowledge, "it shall pass away." 

This gives at least one conception of revela- 
tion, which I have expressed to you on other 
occasions; I have kept you too long about this. 
I must say that revelation has much to do with 
unfolding this to us. The only thought that 
many men have had regarding revelation is 
that God has sent something down from heav- 
en and put it in the human mind. That could 
not be done at all until the human mind is 
ready to see that thing. No truth can be under- 
stood by any mind or in any age until that age 
has been lifted up on the pedestal to look at it. 
Revelation is largely qualifying us to see the 



250 The Witness of Jesus 

truth and make it known. The truth is there 
all the time; the truth does not change. The 
truth is like the scientists would say about the 
quantity of matter in the universe; it has al- 
ways been the same and will always be the 
same, because God is the same. The change 
is in our understanding of it. That is all. We 
get more and more of it as we go along. That 
is revelation, and in that sense — in the view I 
have been talking of — God is still revealing; 
He is never going to stop revealing; revelation 
goes on forever. And the absurdity of the old 
idea that God revealed unto his prophets, and 
the apostles up to about 2 ,000 years ago, and 
then shut up the book and is never going to 
make anything else known, ought to be mani- 
fest to all. You can see, if you look at the 
matter, that He has never stopped revealing, 
and is never going to stop revealing. Revela- 
tion goes on forever. You can see if you look 
at this position, that He has never stopped rea- 
soning; never stopped unfolding, lifting man's 
capacity, giving power to the soul to see more 
and larger solutions of infinite and everlasting 
truth. Just in that way has it appeared to the 
prophets in the ages that have passed away. 

Then the apostle himself looks at things as 
they ought to be. He writes about the church 
as it ought to be — the church of the New Tes- 
tament, his ideal church. The eldership of 



The Coming of the Perfect 251 

the New Testament is the ideal eldership. 
When I get into a group of preachers anywhere 
and the question of the eldership comes up, the 
most common expression is, "I never do see a 
Scriptural eldership.' ' The reason is, when it 
was put down in the book it was put down as 
it ought to be; and we have to take the things 
as they are. There is one great duty that we 
must never lose sight of: it is that we ought to 
try to be what we ought to be. God has placed 
us here in probation. He has sent us an ever- 
lasting proposition to strive toward the perfect, 
and we ought to live fully in that direction. 
We never saw a perfect church. Read the 
Epistle to the Corinthians, and the Epistle to 
the Galatians, and see what God says about the 
best of the churches. How many failures, 
errors, mistakes and imperfections is he try- 
ing to correct! The Apostle Paul never looked 
upon such a congregation as I am looking at 
now. The congregation that Paul looked on 
was gathered up from heathens, Jews and Gen- 
tiles, and ignorant people, and they brought 
all their misconstructions and superstitions with 
them; and that is the reason we have these 
apostolic letters trying to correct them. When 
I am looking at my congregation I think I 
would like them to be conscious of the fact that 
the perfect eldership, the perfect membership, 
is to come. We have never seen a perfect 



252 The Witness of Jesus 

church. There is 110 perfection here. The 
perfect is always beyond us, and above us, and 
we shall go on struggling, aspiring, for that 
which is perfect, which is to come. 

There is one phase of this life that I have not 
time to develop now, but just to mention. 
There is a concept of perfect joy that Paul 
speaks of; there is a way to live notwithstand- 
ing the different capacities and imperfections; 
there is a way of life, where the cup runs over. 
That is love, that is happiness, God and heav- 
en. It does everything good that is done on 
earth. It does everything good that is done in 
Christianity. It is the touch of the soul here 
that makes clearer heaven. I could not con- 
vince you there is no heaven because you be- 
lieve in a perfect one. And w T hen you look 
around in this life you live in — I do not care 
how much love you have, nor how your heart 
overflows; how the tears of joy stream from 
your eyes, as you look at these high things, 
you still say, perfection has not come; I shall 
be happy some day. My place shall be more 
perfect and far higher than it is. My limita- 
tions will be taken away. The things that 
hinder me in all the struggle of life will pass 
away, but the inspirations of life and the teach- 
ings of life will not pass, and Paul says we 
shall get more of them. That is well said and 
truthful. We believe now, but our faith will 



The Coming of the Perfect 253 

widen; we love now, and we shall love forever, 
and that will be the fulfillment of it all. "Now 
abideth faith, hope, love; these three; but the 
greatest of these is love." And he gives the 
reason; it is the difference between now and 
then. Now we know what belief is, and we 
know what hope is, and the heart breaks while 
hoping. You have to sleep above the graves 
of your dead. You have to believe and hope in 
the dismal chamber from which you have tak- 
en your loved one to the graveyard. You have 
to hope, as he who fresh in the vigor and 
health of life goes. That is the side that is 
eternal; and when you look at him in that way, 
when you look at the life of man and God 
through love, the only reality in the universe 
that never departs, that never passes away, 
then we shall see Him and know as we are 
known. 



REMARKS AT COMMUNION SERVICE. 

I have been talking to you of that glorious 
chapter — the 13th of First Corinthians.- Paul 
says love builds all up, and bears all, and en- 
dures all. If it does this it will bring us to 
perfection after awhile. L,ove is all through 
this institution. I do not believe the world 
would have known God's love and God's pow- 



254 The Witness of Jesus 

er; I do not believe the knowledge could have 
come to us of the personal love of the infinite 
Father, if we had not seen that love as exhib- 
ited in Christ's death. And when we go to 
Him, on the last day, we want to feel that God 
is love. This fellowship of Christian hearts, 
w^hich begins here, will go on up there. We 
love Him because He first loved us, and in that 
loving will be found happiness. There is no 
happiness in this world but that. We may 
have comfort, we may have all we want of ma- 
terial blessings. But that is not happiness. 
Happiness is where love is. Let somebody 
leave off loving you here; and how it will pierce 
your heart! Let somebody tell you that the 
boy you have raised doesn't love you, now that 
you are gray-headed. Let love cease in these 
human relations and you w T ill see how it will 
feel. God knew that, and that is the reason 
why He has made us capable of an infinite 
love. We hear simply the first notes of the scale 
here. We will finish them in the heavens — 
these glorious songs of love. We imagine the 
angels sing, but we will sing songs they cannot 
sing, after awhile. 



XIV 
THE UNSEEN THINGS 

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at 
the things which are not seen; for the things which are 
seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are 
eternal. — 2 Cor. 4:18. 

My text this morning consists of these fa- 
miliar words. They have been for many years 
a great favorite with me, and, I hope, with 
you. 

In the religious life of the world, especially 
in that part of it to which the thought is here 
addressed, the look should always be at the un- 
seen; but in consequence of this peculiar organ- 
ism that we have it is only a minority that have 
been intelligently able to take that kind of a 
look. We have a material side of our nature 
that we have to attend to first. That which is 
natural — our bodies, the material organism — is 
developed before there is much developed of the 
spiritual side of our nature, and we are brought 
into such close relations with the demands of 
our bodily organism for food, and raiment, and 
shelter, that it requires us to look, the greater 
part of our lives, so steadily and constantly at 
the material side, that we mix these up with 
our religious thought. Indeed, the thoughts of 

many have been so closely limited to the things 

255 



256 The Witness of Jesus 

that are seen, that they have become incredulous 
about the unseen world at all. Men who are 
educated, who think with acuteness on visible 
things, have been telling us that we know 
nothing of the unseen, the invisible. When 
we preach to them religion, when we preach to 
them the great verities of our faith, they say to 
us, "These things you know nothing about." 
They mean by that a knowledge that we can 
have verified by science. 

There has been a great rage, and I hope not 
too great and that it will grow, for scientific 
investigation. For the last twenty or twenty- 
five yeirs scientists have been looking at visible 
things. They want to analyze things chem- 
ically; they want to verify things in crucibles 
and with apparatus; and what we cannot prove 
that way they suppose to be not worth our at- 
tention. One of their views is, that you "know 
no more about these things than you do about 
the other side of the moon; you know the moon 
has another side; but you never saw the other 
side of it. Now the age in which we live, after 
all the years of investigation it has had, still 
looks with the eye towards the unseen in the 
natural world about us. And what I want to 
talk to you about to-day is, the statement from 
the scientific side of things, in behalf of this 
great world of the unseen — of what we have 
right here of the unseen, the eternal. The 



The Unseen Things 257 

apostle was able to see, at the height at which 
he was standing when he wrote that chapter, 
that there are verities and lights that the eye 
does not look at; and that these are eternal, 
changeless. He was able to see by his experi- 
ence that all that whole world of things that 
we can see and test with our senses is a change 
of things. It is temporal, we call it, using the 
word in its literal sense. The things we see in 
time are used up in time and pass away in 
time. Time changes. 

Now I shall suggest a few illustrations that 
you can all understand — I mean technical illus- 
trations. I have tried to look into these things 
for the last twenty or thirty years, so as to un- 
derstand them. I do not claim to be an adept 
in the use of scientific terms, but I can use 
them well enough for us to understand. I want 
to show you that we live all the life that we 
live at all, by looking at the unseen; and if it 
were not for the look that the eye of the soul is 
steadily taking at the unseen things, no man 
would live a single day. The physical life that 
you are living here in the world, men that have 
seen far even into this physical universe, that 
know most about it, that have looked most 
steadily into it, with the keenest and most in- 
telligent gaze, are not studying now. They are 
not interested in rocks and mountains, in ma- 
terial things; the study of these scientists now 
17 



258 The Witness of Jesus 

is the unseen side of nature. In the last period 
men have been studying what they call the 
"forces." Somehow — and we can form some 
idea how it has come about — God has consti- 
tuted this mind of ours so that we have to look 
behind almost everything we look at. The 
very fact that there is in the mind by its con- 
stitution a perception of what we call the law 
of cause and effect, accounts for the fact. 
When we see the phenomena — when we see the 
effects — when we see the things going on about 
us, we instinctively look for the cause. God 
has made us so that we are compelled to look 
behind, to look for the cause of it. We are 
hunting for an unseen thing. This is the origin 
of all the science in the world — the very fact 
that the mind is made that way. See what you 
will in the phenomena of nature, wherever it 
may be, you ask the cause of that. But the 
cause is the invisible thing. It is not a thing 
you can see with the eye at all, in most cases, 
because when you come down to it, it always is 
an invisible thing. We are studying forces. 
The inventions, the progress of the world's 
history and life, and of that form of life which 
is now the marvel of the ages in the latter part 
of this century, have come to us from the study 
of the invisible things, the forces of nature. 
We never would have got that by studying ma- 
terialities; but when men began to study the 



The Unseen Things 259 

great invisible forces of nature, to learn their 
order, their law, their way of movement, then 
they were able to explain things. And when 
we come to the explanation of these phenomena 
we can utilize them by bringing them into 
service; we can make them the servants of man 
to meet the ordinary needs of life. 

Take the first great conception that we have, 
a fundamental one, of this force of gravitation. 
Nobody has any instrument by which he can 
test anything about it. It is something you 
can not see with your eye, and know, but we 
came to the knowledge of it by phenomena. 
Seeing an apple fall attracted the mind of a 
Newton, and he began to think over the cause 
of it. When he found the cause of it, he found 
an invisible force that he called gravitation. 
He had to have a name for it. Now we have 
faith in that; whether we understand it or not, 
we have faith in it, and we live because we be- 
lieve in it. If such a thing could be imagined 
as a loss of confidence on the part of any one 
who has reasoned on the great method of the 
law of force which we call gravitation, we 
would not stay in this house a moment. It is 
because we believe that gravitation will hold it 
here securely until we get through our service 
and will not be disturbed, that we are content 
to remain here. But if this law were sus- 
pended, nobody at all would be secure. It is 



260 The Witness of Jesus 

because of that quiet confidence that we have in 
the movements of these vast, invisible things, 
that we go about the ordinary business of life. 
I know I am using the word "forces"; which 
scientists would criticise, because they say that 
all forces are resolvable into one, and we ought 
to say "force" and not "forces." But to make 
ourselves understood we have to divide it. 

This is just as true in regard to what we call 
cohesion — that force that holds together the 
particles of everything the world has. In some 
substances it is stronger than in others. We 
say in metal — iron for instance — cohesion acts 
with a great deal more force than it does in 
snow out there, or than between the grains of 
sand. Now if we lost faith in that; or if that 
law of nature were suspended for a moment, 
every visible thing would fall into a vast world 
of sand. It is because we believe in it we 
trust it. 

And when we proceed with all the inventions 
of life and all the processes of life, we are look- 
ing at these unseen things. You take the law 
of what we call chemical affinity. I need not 
go into such an explanation as I could make 
about what that means. It is something 
that knows how to separate things and put them 
together. This has been at work on this planet 
since gravitation began. Mark Hopkins gave 
us a splendid picture when this whole system of 



The Unseen Things 261 

gravitation, of cohesion, and then of chemical 
affinity, was illustrated. We wanted the ores 
in one place; we wanted the iron in one place 
on the earth, in the soil, and we wanted a force 
working by law that would separate these things 
and put each one in its place. And when you 
look on you cannot see it with your eye; no 
man can see it with his natural eye at all. 
But to illustrate it: you put food into your 
stomach and this law of chemical affinity goes 
to work and makes blood where you need blood, 
and bone where you need bone, and muscle 
where you need muscle. Now if you were to 
lose faith in that, or if the law were suspended, 
your health is gone. Just suspend the law of 
chemical affinity in your stomach and you will 
die. It is because you have confidence that 
that law will do its part, you swallow your food. 
No man would put it into his mouth, would 
venture a single moment to swallow anything 
into his stomach, without confidence in the 
law of chemical affinity. You cannot see that 
law; you cannot see that force, but you know 
the great reality of it by the way you live. 
And so we might go on with all of them. 

We take what we call vital force, which is 
the same thing. You may take all the micro- 
scopes that have ever been invented; you can- 
not see the vital force of a grain. But it is 
because men believe in it in the springtime, 



262 The Witness of Jesus 

when the sun shines and the soil is warm and 
mellow, they deposit the grain in the ground. 
If there were no confidence in that vital force 
not a grain would be sown. The world is fed 
by the look at an invisible thing. There would 
not be a single man on the plains from which 
our bread comes from year to year that would 
go abroad in his field and scatter a single seed 
without absolute confidence in an invisible 
thing, which we call vital force. It is looking 
at the vital force that is the invisible thing by 
which we live. And yet men come and tell us 
that unless they can see the thing with their 
eyes, and touch it with their hands, and test 
it with the senses, they cannot believe! You 
see how far they are from the great reality of 
life. 

These few forces that I have been talking to 
you about now are only some of the unseen 
things, and yet they lie at the foundation of life 
and of physical subsistence. And it is looking 
at these invisible realities, and confidence in 
these invisible lealities, that enables us to build 
houses to live in, sow and reap, and carry on 
the processes of life. It is the look at the un- 
seen that does all this. 

Now I want to state another thing in connec- 
tion with this, to lead up to another point that 
I take advantage of in my studies of Christianity 
and of the universe, for I stated that God is 



The Unseen Things 263 

everywhere to me. Now of these forces that I 
am talking about, take electricity, which gives 
us a still better illustration. These forces, we 
are told by the scientists themselves, are eternal. 
Their way of saying it is, that force is endless; 
and when they explain that they say that force 
can and will never end. Put your mind on it 
in time or eternity, it is there; put your mind 
on it at any time in the great future, and you 
can imagine it there. These are the eternal 
things. And the way the scientist looks at the 
material world now is to try to account for all 
its changes of form. That is all we can know 
about anything — its changes of form and mode 
of existence. The thought on which it rests 
never changes and is eternal. So, looking at 
these external things, it is a literal fact that 
the unseen things are the eternal things, and 
that by the concession of all the scientists in 
the world. Now, there is a great deal more in 
this than you may think. I almost revere the 
names of the great men who have looked into 
nature and taught us so much about it. I am 
not one of those who stand in the pulpit to de- 
nounce Spencerism, or the theories of Huxley 
or Darwin. They are the benefactors of the 
age, and of all future ages. They have taught 
us nothing but the great fundamental and eter- 
nal things of life. They have asserted simply 
what is true. They have worked for us. They 



264 The Witness of Jesus 

have said, Here is a phenomenon; let us find 
the cause of it. And they have found the cause 
of it. These men love truth for truth's sake, 
and that is what I honor them for; and their 
grand lives show that there is sincerity and in- 
tegrity in their thought and labor. I need 
these vast truths that lie behind the visible and 
show us the invisible and eternal. 

Now the apostle speaks in regard to Chris- 
tianity, in regard to the phenomena of life, and 
he is contrasting this life and the life to come. 
And I want to show you directly that he says 
it is not the visible, it is not the form you see, 
that is eternal. They are just like the things 
around you in nature; they come and they go. 
The part that you look at — the body, bones and 
blood — is changing. This is the way of liv- 
ing, the form of existence. That is all I know 
about anything. But underlying it, as there is 
underlying everything in existence in this uni- 
verse, there is a something that is eternal, and 
that invisible thing is what Paul speaks of as 
the unseen things of the world. You see, in 
the connection here, that he is looking on that 
side of life that* we experience most keenly. 
He had been giving them some of his own ex- 
perience, his persecution and tribulation, his 
great sufferings; yet he says to them, I know 
these are changeable things. They do not last 
long. But there is underlying it something 



The Unseen Things 265 

that I see by faith, and I know that is eternal. 
These afflictions are but for a little while. All 
sufferings last but a little while; but they are 
working for us, they are producing in our minds 
and hearts, thoughts and feelings. They are 
weaning and separating us from these things, 
so that we shall not be unduly attached to them. 
They are working for us "a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory, while we are look- 
ing, not at the things that are seen, but at the 
things that are not seen" — those vast realities 
that are eternal. The very form of the expres- 
sion is one that looks like a contradiction, and 
to a man that only knows the surface it is a 
contradiction, to look at an invisible thing. 
When you see a man looking steadily toward 
what he supposes to be some object, you in- 
stinctively look that way, to see if you can see 
anything. That is the theory Paul has in his 
mind. Now, he says, here is a class of men 
that have come up in the world within this gen- 
eration in which I am living. I see all of them 
gazing steadily at something that is eternal, that 
the eye cannot see. They are simply looking 
at an invisible thing, a thing not visible to any 
human eye. We see it by faith. We are 
walking, looking and working by faith. Now 
we have to work by faith, as I have shown you, 
in our household, in our fields; simply by faith. 
It is not by sense, but by faith. And it is just 



266 The Witness of Jesus 

so in religion exactly. We live here in this 
body, we come in contact with heat and cold, 
with disease and the accidents of life; we feel 
their force; and all these changes are going on 
in our fields, and everywhere things are becom- 
ing invisible, like everything that is visible in 
the universe of God. But there is something 
in it and about it that is invisible and eternal. 
Now look at this. The argument that has 
been given to us by scientists. We have been 
told, and told rightly and truly, that these 
invisible things in nature are the eternal things. 
Spencer, Huxley and Darwin say that all these 
forces are simply divine laws. I do not know 
any word by which men — scientific men, even, 
and religious men — can deceive themselves 
more effectually than by the word lazv. You 
hear everybody talking of things being govern- 
ed, not according to law, but by law. All things 
are governed by law. Yet in this sense nothing 
is governed by law at all; law governs nothing. 
Things can be governed according to law, but 
there is to be a government back of and higher 
than the law. You take all the laws in our 
statute books, and codify them, and put them 
in the finest volume you ever saw; and get all 
the books and put them in the court-house, and 
see if they will govern anybody. There is to 
be a government, there is to be a will, there is 
to be somebody that knows what the law is, 






The Unseen Things 267 

and who governs the people by the law. That 
is nature; that is experience. The lawyer se, 
does not govern anything. And so, when we 
have all these forces at work, there is somebody 
that is moving them, and moving them in har- 
mony, and the result is law and order. The 
law is simply employed as a method; and the 
laws of nature are God's methods. And we 
have to go back, after a while, to the original 
government. God knows the law and governs 
the universe in accordance with it. That is a 
fact evident in your experience and mine, and 
in that of everybody else in the world. Now 
you take this force. It is God's will that is 
working in nature, in harmony with the method 
which He Himself has fixed in nature. 

Now we are told, and told truly, too, that 
this force is never to end. The reason why 
this force does not end is because it is God's 
own method and plan. It does not begin, and 
does not end, any more than God can begin and 
end. These forces are eternal. Here are grav- 
ity, cohesion, chemical affinity, magnetism, and 
vital force, called the great quantum of natural 
forces. There are five of them and they are 
eternal. They never began, and • they will 
never end. And I find here another force, a 
force that is vastly higher than natural forces, 
for it takes advantage of them, and makes these 
forces its servants; something that takes elec- 



268 The Witness of Jesus 

tricity — the law that is used to carry thought 
all over the world — and uses it to carry on all 
the commerce and business of the world, 
that increases largely communication among 
men. There is a mind underlying that move- 
ment of the trains and ships and commerce and 
business of the world. There is a force that is 
managing and directing all these, and that uses 
them like the fingers. 

You take the vital force, and here is some- 
thing else greater. You recognize a force above 
it, an intelligent force that knows how to use 
and make that vital force feed the world. And 
this kindly force in the heart and soul of man, 
that takes all the forces of nature and uses 
them, just as he uses all other instruments to 
feed and clothe himself and carry on his busi- 
ness, making them his servants — would it not be 
a strange thing if it were not eternal? Can you 
doubt it? I won't say to you that this demon- 
strates the immortality of the soul, but it makes 
it impossible not to believe that there is some- 
thing that goes on after this natural force stops, 
that has never begun and will never end. They 
are my servants; I am greater than they are; 
God has made and formed me as their king, 
and I will make them serve myself. They 
weave my cloak, give me food, transport me 
anywhere I want to go. I make them my 
servants. And yet I am merely temporal, and 



The Unseen Things 269 

these things that I am using are eternal! This 
is the absurdity that we are asked to accept by 
scientific students. I am looking at it purely 
from their standpoint. So far, then, as our 
present knowledge goes, so far as the best 
thoughts of the best thinkers go, to whatever 
school they may belong, if those on this planet 
have been able to show us anything at all, they 
have shown us that these great invisible forces 
are eternal. They can only change their modes 
of existence; that is all. They do not come 
into being and go out of being; they only 
change their form of existence. So, then, we 
can have, from a purely scientific standpoint, 
what amounts to a demonstration of immortality. 
For if these forces are eternal, much more is He 
that manages them eternal. 

And that is the reason why, in religion, we 
look not at the things that are seen. They do 
not cause an absorbing interest. We are look- 
ing at the unseen. Paul states the great truth 
that has required a thousand years to live up to. 
These people's physical needs, he says, are 
ephemeral, they are temporal; but the invisible 
things are eternal. That is the contrast he 
makes between the visible and the invisible. 
It seems to me, then, that we have here, on any 
ground that the scientist can place us, the ad- 
vantage; and we are right thus to look at it. I 
do not have time to-day to look at the other 



270 The Witness of Jesus 

argument that we get out of it. To me it lias 
a stronger one than this; and I am in a position 
now to see what science is going to say to me 
about immortality. 

The idea of immortality to the scientist is 
such an absurdity that it cannot be entertained. 
The idea that a man who dies goes into nothing! 
No scientist who understands it can believe 
such a thing without contradicting the funda- 
mental principles on which he reasons about 
everything else. This is my position in regard 
to the thought that is moving the world; and I 
am ready, then, with the apostle, to express the 
certainty with which he brings in the next 
sentence. "Therefore," he said, "having seen 
that the invisible things are the eternal things 
and cannot change," cannot cease to exist, but 
must go on and on, "we know that if the earth- 
ly house of this tabernacle were dissolved" — if 
this present form of existence be changed — 
"we have a building of God, a house not made 
with hands, eternal, in the heavens." We are 
drawn to Him because He is the fountain of 
all the forces in the universe; He is the force 
of the universe; and these forces are simply 
manifestations of His power and His wisdom in 
working in the visible things about us. 

These are some of the reasons why I believe 
so confidently in the future life. These are 
some of the reasons why it is when we bring 



The Unseen Things 271 

the bodies of Christian men and women, lay 
them here before us, and read these words to 
you, that I have not the slightest misgiving in 
regard to their future. 

The reason why I can turn with confidence to 
these great commentaries in which the inspired 
seer saw these things, and spoke of them, is 
that they harmonize with the whole vast sys- 
tem of universal truth. We have not yet come 
into the splendor of the glories of which we are 
capable, when we see that life beyond us. This 
is the way the apostle thought about it, and he 
thought rationally. All the unfolding of 
knowledge only shows the higher, grander, and 
more glorious light that the centuries have had 
in regard to this truth. The idea would be 
absurd to me, to say that we now have the 
beautiful light of the sun; we have all the space 
above us filled with glory; and then, after a few 
hours, it is all gone. The day seems gone for- 
ever. It will be just that way. When we see 
the real fact it is this: the sunlight has to pass 
away — this common day that we are so used to. 
When night settles down over the earth, and 
you look up, you see a million suns. You do 
not see the splendors and glories of the universe 
until the daylight is gone. We should not 
know, we never could have known, of the glo- 
ries of the stellar worlds if there had been no 
darkness in the universe we live in. It is only 



272 The Witness of Jesus 

when the deepest darkness comes that we can 
know. Then we look out on glorious planets 
and worlds that we cannot number; we see all 
about us the splendor of the heavens rising 
when darkness is on the earth. Is not that the 
way it will be, brethren? There is no uncer- 
tainty about that to me. When the light 
fadeth on this earth we look out at the splendor 
of a spiritual universe in the world beyond. 
We get here the common sunlight of the expe- 
rience of life, but then, when that closes in 
upon night, when the eyes are shut, they shall 
open to see it all in indescribable grandeur. 
That is what this great man is looking at, 
and wants us to see when this life is gone and 
death settles upon us. 

We have this great fact set before us in this 
marvelous presentation. No difference what 
men may theorize; how far they may see out 
into the world beyond us; what molecules and 
atoms they may try to look at below; when we 
study the movements of the great forces of the 
universe, we find that this truth is in harmony 
with it all. It is a part of that great system of 
God, the Almighty, who made it all. This life 
of man, changing here, passes out into the x un- 
seen to assume a more glorious form at last. 
This is why we love to sing, as we are on our 
way, "Nearer, my God, to thee." 



The Unseen Things 273 

"And when, on joyful wing, 

Cleaving the sky, 
Sun, moon and stars forgot, 

Upward I fly. 
Still all my song shall be, 
Nearer, my God, to thee, 

Nearer to thee." 

That is our faith, and our faith rests upon an 
everlasting rock. 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

The thought in this institution, brethren and 
sisters, is much nearer to us than the one I have 
been trying to lay before you this morning. 
Here is something eternal also. If there is any- 
thing eternal in the universe, and that has a 
right to be eternal, it is love. The argument I 
have been making to you is purely intellectual. 
But the heart is deeper than that, and the thing 
which is eternal, because it is God himself, is 
love. And we cannot look at this without feel- 
ing that we are still within the eternal. We 
are in the grasp'of that which can never fail in 
the infinite ages. That is Paul's argument in 
another place. This is the subject. You have 
it here to-day. Our Father brings it here from 
week to week, and shows it to you; shows you 
His heart, shows you its depths; reveals to you 

the infinity of His love. Whenever we look on 
18 



274 The Witness of Jesus 

the central sun of nature, or anything in the 
universe, it shows us the love of God, that this 
institution brings so much nearer to us. 



XV 
THE LAW OF GLORIFICATION 

Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall 
into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it 
bringeth forth much fruit.— -John 12:24. 

The subject this morning is the reply of 
Jesus to Andrew and Philip when they came 
to Him announcing that there were Greeks 
present desiring to see Him. 

The text seems to me to present to us the law 
of glorification; and the reason I have selected 
this subject to-day is that it is in harmony with 
the subject we had before us on last Sunday, 
when we tried to form some conception of the 
purposes of this kingdom, or rather of our going 
into it. We tried to think of the universe as it 
appears to the best thought in the world now, 
as looking upward; of the power that is behind 
it or in it, working through it all, and always 
working toward the perfect. 

Perhaps I am not constituted right; if so, it 
is my misfortune, but if I have a religion at all 
I must see a reason in it and incident to it. I 
can see reason in every religious position I hold; 
that is the extent to which it is my belief. 

And to the degree in which reason enters into 

275 



276 The Witness of Jesus 

faith it is intelligent; beyond that, faith is su- 
perstition. I am not able to see any reason in 
the world unless I see God in it, working in it, 
working through it, and working toward that 
far-off end to which all things are moving. 
This is merely an introductory statement, to 
show that I conceive that God is not absent 
from the universe at any moment, in the past, 
present or eternal future. If He were, to that 
extent it would break into my thought. God is 
infinite and omnipresent. I have to think of 
Him as present in every atom of this universe, 
always, everywhere. 

Now I call your attention to this statement — 
this law of glorification. We do not any of us 
question the fact that there is such a thing as 
glorification for a great many things. But that 
this has come about in a regular oraer; that 
everything has a divine process, according to the 
law of the eternal causation — this is what we 
do not take into our thought; and that is the 
thought I wish to call your attention to to-day. 
I take it the general position I have stated is 
true; that, in this universe, the Author of it, 
the Infinite Mind and Power in it, is working 
toward perfection; that everything must be 
glorified at the end; and, according to my con- 
ception of it, that end is to be reached in har- 
mony with processes that are natural; the 
ruling of the law of the universe, of order in 



The Law of Glorification 277 

the universe of God. That is the reason why 
I stated it in regard to man and the final end 
that he shall reach. The highest place that he 
shall ever attain shall be reached according to 
that same law, from which nothing escapes. To 
me the great Teacher looks into this fundamental 
law of things, in the expression to which I have 
called your attention. It seems to me that that 
is the view he is taking of the universe. These 
men that came to him were Greeks, not Gre- 
cians, as they were sometimes called — which 
means Jews who lived among the Greeks and 
were Hellenized — but Greeks. Their keen in- 
tellect and curiosity, characteristic of that peo- 
ple, are indicated by the incident. When they 
went to the disciples they said, "We want to 
see Jesus; we have heard a great deal about 
Him." It had awakened a great curiosity in 
them to know more of Him of whom such 
things were said. And when the message was 
conveyed to Him He said, "The hour is come 
when the Son of man is to be glorified." It 
will occur readily to your mind that Jesus feels 
Himself standing in connection with the whole 
race — that thought which comes out of His 
teaching everywhere, in which He transcended 
all the thought of his people in the previous 
ages of the human race — that the life in Him, 
the truth in Him, the good that is in Him, is 
for man. The Jew had never thought of that 



278 The Witness of Jesus 

before. They had thought that the light and 
the good were for them, for their nation, and if 
other nations ever got any of it, it was to be 
only through them; that it must come through 
them and in their way. But Jesus had in Him 
all the time, it seems to me, that which trans- 
cended all nationalities and is for the race. 
And now, if people entirely outside wanted to 
see into the marvelous life, the very natural ex- 
pression was, "The time is come when the Son 
of God must be glorified," and when this life, 
of which He speaks in this same chapter, should 
break out for all the nations. The time is come 
when that name, now so humble, "and so 
much despised by a large part of the world, 
shall become glorified in human nature. That 
time has arrived. And the next thought is of 
the process by which it comes. That gives you 
the language of the text. He immediately 
states the great law of glorification by an illus- 
tration. "Unless a corn of wheat" — grain of 
wheat— "fall into the ground and die," and be 
glorified, it really remains alone, what it is. 
If it is to change; if it is to grow; if it is to 
effloresce; if it is to be glorified at all, it is to 
go through this process of death, burial and 
resurrection from the dead. He called the at- 
tention of these men to this fact. He does not 
state the great form of glory and the glorifica- 
tion, nor state the whole process by which it is 



The Law of Glorification 279 

to be reached. It immediately comes to his 
mind and he gives us this illustration, in regard 
to which we are so anxious in the age in which 
we live — the thought to which I have already- 
given utterance — that of the law and the order 
of eternal causation; the regularity with which 
everything in this universe is ruled, which has 
taken possession of the minds of men now. 
What would men like those think of this law — 
that in order that a life, or a man, should be 
glorified there must be a death, a burial, and a 
resurrection from the dead? Paul has told us. 
It was called by these very Greeks "foolish- 
ness." It is called, when the apostle repeats 
the language afterwards, an offense — the idea 
that God, the infinite mind, has a law, and that 
law requires this process in order to glorifica- 
tion. To me it does seem the central concep- 
tion of the life of Jesus; it does contain a suffi- 
cient demonstration that He knows more than 
man and is more than man. It does not seem 
to me that any angel could have been lifted to 
that height and could have understood this 
great law which we have been trying to get 
hold of from that day to this. It places Him 
in the very highest attitude before our minds. 

A death, a burial and a resurrection — this 
is the law of glorification for all terrestrial 
things. Jesus simply takes one specimen; 
He might have taken any other. Every 



280 The Witness of Jesus 

seed of grain that is ever matured on this 
planet, if it is to be glorified at all, has to pass 
through this process. It is the law. We know 
that, all of us. And now, He says, that is true 
in regard to man. He places himself, with ref- 
erence to His own glorification, under the con- 
trol of this law. What is meant by glorification? 
We take a meaning of the word from this 
passage. Sometimes we take something that 
gladdens us, makes our heart rejoice, that comes 
upon us unexpectedly, and we use the word 
"glory," and we think that is glorification. 
The old nations were all sun worshipers. 
When the light has been overshadowed, when 
the thick darkness of the night on the abyss 
has been there long enough, a light begins to 
break, and all the infinite space is filled with 
glory; the world is glorified. That was the 
first conception of it; and then when anything 
else, under the influence of the sun, was un- 
folded like a flower suddenly before the eyes, 
the eyes were filled with glory. So it is in re- 
gard to man. We see him clothed with flesh 
and blood; if we could see him filled with that 
kind of light, efflorescent with that kind of 
beauty, we would call that glorifying him. 

Now I want to call your attention to a few 
facts with which you are familiar about this 
universal law, to show you that there is nothing 
at all to stagger the faith of any human being, 



The Law of Glorification 281 

in the great central facts of our religion — the 
death, the burial, the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ. If we look at it in connection with 
what He has stated here himself; with what He 
clearly states in other places concerning the 
same thing, I think it prepares us to hear what 
objections the keenest intellects will have in- 
vented against our faith in Christ, and especially 
in these marvelous facts concerning him. In 
the very earliest part of his life, in the tempta- 
tion, before he first entered the work of the 
ministry, you can see that this whole view 
passed before his mind. It came to him when 
he was thinking of the wise, rich and glorious 
position he might hold in the world. That is 
how I conceive of the temptation, just as men 
ordinarily see it. He had been starting in an 
obscure and humble position. He was under 
the power of the rulership of the earth; when 
one man commanded the forces of this planet. 
That is one way of leading men, by collecting 
armies, when you have power to do it; by 
walking according to the human plan and 
human ambition, human aspirations, along that 
line of human pride, ambition and glory; that 
was one way. The other way was shown in 
the temptation and the cross. When it was 
suggested to him, "Here are the kings of the 
world, and the glory of them; you may reign 
over them," He said, "I cannot do that. The 



282 The Witness of Jesus 

other way is by a death, a burial, a resurrec- 
tion. I expect to go down first, and then come 
up. I have come into this world to conform to 
the laws of the universe. I have not come here 
to break any law, but to walk in harmony with 
them. The whole temptation means that. I 
saw the Caesars and the Alexanders ascend and 
be glorified, and upon that they have fallen for- 
ever. I saw the men that conform to God's law 
coming down and going up, ascending and re- 
maining forever. I prefer that." 

This was the choice taken by Jesus before 
he entered upon his ministry, and it seems 
to me that a conception like that places Him 
far beyond any of the world's great teachers. 
We have just that same thought here. Now, if 
this be true, and is universal law, and I believe 
it is a universal law, to which there is no ex- 
ception — then we may expect to apply it to 
everything. It is just as true of nations as it 
is of plants, trees and all individual life, and 
there is no nation on the earth to-day that un- 
derstands its history, that has ever been glo- 
rified, that has had power, wealth, freedom and 
manhood, that has not come to such things by 
dying and being buried and rising again, some- 
times over and over again. There is no excep- 
tion to it. The great English race, to which 
we belong; the German empire, and the French 
empire, and the American State — each of these 



The Law of Glorification 283 

has had its death, burial and resurrection, in a 
metaphorical sense. There is no other way to 
glory, to that which constitutes the real glory 
of anything, according to its nature. 

This is the thought that I want to get into 
your minds and hearts. I can usually illustrate 
it in the history of the Jewish nation, because 
that is familiar to me. And its history has been 
studied, memorized and gone over and books 
written on it for hundreds of years and for more 
than that. Now if you take that and just fol- 
low it along we see just what we see in every 
other nation. Abraham, the founder of it, is 
called; he starts out, and after a while there is 
Isaac and Ishmael. He is told to look at the 
stars in heaven, at the sand on the seashore, and 
see what his race will be. This fills his heart 
with aspirations of that sort, and then follows 
that history. We need not go down with him 
into Egypt and come back. We need not go 
any farther back than Jacob, with his twelve 
sons, in the land that God gave him, and told 
him, Thou shalt have all of this. And now we 
would expect, according to the usual conception 
of the scientists, that you have only to look on 
that side, and there are twelve children, twelve 
sons of Jacob; and all they have to do is to live 
and multiply and gain possession of this land 
until after a while, in the ages to come, they 
would realize the promise given to Abraham. 



284 The Witness of Jesus 

We would expect that. But we do not go very 
long until we look at Palestine and there is no 
Jacob there; no son of Jacob; they are all gone. 
And we wait there 400 years, but Jacob and his 
sons are buried; you cannot find them. And 
then after a while they come back, a vast army. 
Moses leads them out of Egypt; leads them to 
the land of promise, and says, Now gain pos- 
session of it, and after the great conflict of 
Joshua they took possession of it. They waited ; 
and a nation has come from Abraham, and that 
nation is in possession of this land of Canaan. 
Well, we take the scientific view, and see what 
we have to do. We have ownership; we have 
possession; we have the promise of God, and 
we have nothing to do but to live right and take 
care of the land, and go right on, and according 
to the regular processes we shall realize this 
dream. That is the way our reason would say. 
But Jesus says, that is not the law. And God 
says, that is not the law. Then you have to 
take the universe and study it as He does 
After a few hundred years this nation has organ- 
ized a great empire. After a century you go 
back and they are gone. There is no temple, 
there is no Israel. All are gone except a few of 
the poorest and most obscure people. It is 
buried again. The nation died, it is buried in 
the depths, and you cannot find a volunteer to 



The Law of Glorification 285 

hunt for them. We have that fact; but they 
are to realize that law of glorification. 

We go after a while along history. There are 
two different periods of resurrection already; 
and then the Persians get possession, and the 
Jews are brought back. Then they begin to 
say, Now we will rise, and we read most of the 
triumphant psalms in their literature. Some of 
the prophets they have there then expect to 
realize the dream. We read that the temple 
was organized and the priesthood established its 
power. The whole natior has a future now; 
they have got rid of idolatry, and the cause of 
all the trouble has gone; they are united, and 
again we expect to see them go straight on, 
according to the scientific view of history, until 
it shall realize the glorification. Then we go 
forward, and after a while we look again. It 
has gone. I could state a hundred facts, which 
would take time and would not add anything to 
the force of the argument. The Romans are in 
possession of the land. Jerusalem is burned. 
Hundreds and thousands of them are sold in 
Egypt and all over the known world, and no 
Jews are there. Another death, a burial and a 
resurrection. 

There is no resurrection now in the form in 
which we had it before, but this great Jew that 
is talking to us here this morning is standing 
before the world telling the world of his future 



286 The Witness of Jesus 

death, burial and resurrection — a future which 
means the fulfillment of the whole of the great 
promises made in the past ages. And Christ 
had twelve men about him, with one of whom 
he is talking; and with these we start out again. 
We think we will have no more trouble. We 
have "God manifest in the flesh," as the Chris- 
tian world looks at it; we have the power and 
the wisdom; we have this tremendous char- 
acter, and we have these twelve men selected. 
And he has put into their minds these great 
principles that will capture the world. What 
is now to hinder his just going on, teaching 
them, educating more and more of them accord- 
ing to our own processes, multiplying his power, 
sending abroad this vast truth, till after a while 
the whole of the world is converted? Is that 
the way? No. There is to be another death, 
a burial, a resurrection; an exhibition of God's 
law, as is exhibited by the grain of wheat. 
That is what startled these men as it startles 
the world yet. This is the great fact. How 
shall the glory of Israel, the dream of the 
prophets, and of the truest and happiest hearts 
of the world now be realized? He speaks of a 
death, burial and resurrection; and they took 
Him and put Him to death and buried Him, 
according to His own statement. The Son of 
man can be glorified in no other way. 

These are the facts. They are not exceptions 



The Law of Glorification 287 

to nature at all. They are in harmony with 
the great law of progress in this world. The 
name of Jesus and the glory of Jesus to-day; 
the millions of tongues that are talking about 
Him; the millions of hearts that are thinking 
about Him; the millions that are admiring and 
loving Him, adoring Him— all this is the result. 
The Son of man shall be glorified; that is part 
of it. It has been fulfilled whether we see it or 
not. He means us to see it, though it was 
written a long time ago. 

These men organized directly after that, and 
started out again. They begin to talk about 
Jesus. He begins to be glorified. The church 
is organized, and now we think we will go right 
onward. We have got a church; we have got 
apostles; we have got the angels; we have the 
heart of fire, full of love for all the nations of 
the earth — for the people around the Nile, 
around the Mediterranean — they are all hearing 
about it. The churches are being organized 
and the work is carried along; nothing to do 
but just to grow into the domination of the 
world and bring in the reign of the millennium. 
That was the view which many entertained at 
the beginning. But after a little while there is 
no church there. It is just like Israel. You 
go into the countries where it had been and 
there is a horde of barbarians, savages occupy 
the lands and the church is gone. In less than 



288 The Witness of Jesus 

four hundred years the church is dead and 
buried. What glory it had is eclipsed. Then, 
after a while, there came another resurrection. 
That is the way we look at it; of course the 
Catholics have a different view. But when 
Protestantism began to come we began to have 
a resurrection again of the church, and it is 
rising now. Whether it will have another one 
or not I do not know. But we are in one of 
these great resurrections. The church has had 
the same kind of history Israel had. 

But then we have another fact to which I 
wish to call your attention, in harmony with 
this. That is all I can do, just collect a few of 
these facts and let you look at them. Here is 
a man coining from the world into the church. 
In the world he is dead. I mean by that he is 
dead to the spiritual life. He will be conscious 
of the Roman and Greek life and all that; it 
had no spiritual side. When a man is inter- 
ested in a thing, when his interest is kindled, 
we say he is made alive to it; that is the sense 
in which it is used. You take a man that is 
not interested, he is dead to it. That is the 
way the apostle contemplates man in the world. 
He has no thought about this matter, no inter- 
est in it at all. Now, he says, you are alive. 
Then again, speaking to the world, he says, 
You are alive to sin, you have a large interest 
in that; your life, your whole future is working 



The Law of Glorification 289 

that way. How are you going to come into the 
church till you die? The first thing for a man 
to do to get into the church is to die; he is to 
be a dead man. The life he had in the world 
must in some way be killed out. That is why 
the apostle says, when he is speaking of this 
cross of Christ, to the Greek, that the old life 
becomes as nothing when he rises to the value 
and importance of this new life. The true path 
to glory, Jesus says, to great spiritual power, to 
kinship and fellowship with the infinite God, 
man finds in the new life. It is called rising 
again. You cannot get from the world to the 
church without dying to the world and being 
made alive to God — a death and a coming to 
life again. You read the sixth chapter of 
Romans and the whole process is made known 
to you. There Paul shows the significance of 
baptism. Baptism means that. If it does not 
amount to something, it is not worth having. 
If my baptism does not have any meaning in it 
I don't want to have it. It brings nothing to 
anybody unless there can be seen a meaning in 
it. To me it is a regular fetich, and nothing 
else, if it does not mean something, as a great 
deal of worship is, in my judgment. 

But now you see it in its beauty. You have 
got the moral law of the universe — God's fun- 
damental law of progress — rising from the low- 
est position to the highest position, and that by 
19 



290 The Witness of Jesus 

dying, and being buried, and rising all the way 
along. And when you come to a man's spir- 
itual life you find it is no exception to it. He 
dies to the old life and is made alive to the 
new. He has complied with this ordinance of 
baptism right through, before he can visibly 
show it to you. That is the reason why it is to 
be in that place. It is that way all through the 
New Testament. Yet I know that there are 
men just as religious as I am, just as sure to go 
to heaven, and perhaps some more so, who do 
not look at it in that way. There are men who 
say there is no meaning in it, that they do not 
want it. It has a beautiful meaning in it, and 
I see it flashing through. I see the great and 
glorious light of God symbolized beautifully. 
You take this man that has died to the world, 
been made alive to God, and the beginning has 
been marked by baptism. He starts out; what 
is to help him to go on regularly? We would 
think that a man ought to live just the life that 
God lived in Christ. Let the light shine in his 
mind; let it illuminate his heart. Walk on- 
ward, and get power like Elijah; after a while, 
float off. That would be the regular way. But 
He says, no, there is to be another death, an- 
other burial, another resurrection, before you 
reach that. You take the Christian men, the 
purest men on this earth, and there can be no 
exception to God's law, none who will not be 



The Law of Glorification 291 

glorified ultimately in this whole progress from 
the beginning to the end. 

It would take much longer than time allows 
to show you that God does not work other- 
wise. I can take the movements of the 
churches — the chief movements that have been 
in the world, and show that there has been no 
progress anywhere except by going up and going 
down, rising and falling. That is God's law, 
and there will be no exception to it. And after 
we have lived our life here, after we have lived 
a life in Christ, after we have taken this great 
fundamental law of dying to the lower side of 
our life, we can realize true glorification. Jesus 
brings that up. He says that a man who tries 
to save his life on this earth shall lose it, and a 
man that loses his life becomes alive to the 
other life. If a man serves me my Father will 
honor him; and whatever I shall obtain of glory 
in this universe shall be his. If we have any 
of us faith in Christ to-day, that faith is resting 
upon the great law by which all things have 
moved. 

I do not know whether I have made myself 
intelligible to you or not. But faith in Christ, 
faith in Him as the Founder of the church, as 
the Giver of the new life, as the resurrection 
from the dead, as the hope of everlasting glory, 
is a rising for all. I see all the history of this 
planet from the beginning to the end, where I 



292 The Witness of Jesus 

stand, and I believe it is in perfect harmony 
with this law. That is what I mean when I 
say that my religion must have reason in it, 
which must be adjusted to the whole system of 
truth that I see in this universe. Christian 
faith, Christian hope, Christian life, is just that 
which lays hold of the foundation of things; and 
the great law of the universe of God. If you 
see this, brethren, as I see it, it will make your 
hope sweeter, stronger, fuller; there will be no 
trembling in it, anywhere. And after a while, 
"In the sweet bye and bye," which we shall 
sing directly, we shall no more doubt it. We 
will look back from those heights and listen to 
these songs. We shall have seen, then, this 
whole process through which we have come. 
It will be plain to us then, and I believe it will 
be just that way from what we see now. 

This is my conception of the ground on which 
faith — Christian faith — is resting to-day. 



XVI 
THE CREED OF THE CHURCH 

When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi he 
asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I, the 
Son of man, am? And they said, Some say that thou art 
John the Baptist; some Klias; and others Jeremias, or one 
of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye 
that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art 
the Christ, the Son of the living God.— Matt. 16:13-16. 

My subject is the creed of the church and its 
confession. We have had before your minds, 
in two or three sermons, the same view of Jesus, 
as the one that was to come, intimations of the 
experiences before he came, some of the rea- 
sons why, as we see them, it was necessary that 
some one should come. We showed you, in 
one of these discourses, that it is not an arbi- 
trary thing in human nature at all; it is not 
something that some prophet had placed me- 
chanically in his mind, and he mechanically 
told. That is not my conception of it. I tried 
to show you that it is the experience of the 
Jewish race. There was in their minds a faith 
generated by this experience in the presence of 
some one to come. They were placed, just as 
we are placed, between the two great ends that 
lie before us in the future. Optimism, one is 
called; the other is pessimism. We must be- 
lieve that all things will go to the bad, to the 

293 



294 The Witness of Jesus 

worst, to destruction, or we must believe that 
all things will become better. But when men 
had it revealed to their hearts; once they un- 
derstood there was one God; that He is in- 
finitely wise and infinitely gracious; that man 
is weak; that men are His children; that He 
has the management of this world, they were 
compelled to believe that, as long as they 
are here, God has the best future for them, 
not the worst. But when they looked at their 
own experience they were not able to bring it 
all about. Well, they believed in it, and 
thought that through that nation, as it was or- 
ganized, God was going to bring the world to 
the knowledge of Himself and lift it all up. 
But the nations about them, the pagan nations, 
just came and took them away, and they were 
groaning in captivity. And when by that cap- 
tivity they had learned this truth better, and 
were brought back, they began to shout that 
God was going to bring about the great, glori- 
ous and perfect end for humanity. And before 
they began to realize this, the Greeks came, 
under Alexander the Great, and then the 
Assyrians oppressed them, broke them up and 
scattered them. And another tremendous and 
enormous effort was made under the Maccabees, 
and they came back, having won their empire, 
and began to sing again. We have still a great 
many of their Maccabeean hymns and prophe- 



The Creed of the Church 295 

cies. They said, Now we will go and realize 
that which is best; the glory of the Lord is 
going to cover the whole earth; and then the 
Romans scattered them all over the world. 
And yet it is hard for the mind to cease believ- 
ing in optimism; it must believe that there is a 
future for men, and some one must come and 
reveal it. That was what brought that faith 
and made it so deathless. And when Jesus 
came, these men who are mentioned in our text 
called him the Christ. The leaders of human- 
ity up to this time were prophets, priests and 
kings. Jesus was all of them. He was the one 
that was to come and lead humanity out of all 
its troubles. As we showed you last Sunday, 
He was the Christ, the Messiah, that was filling 
the hearts of men about the time he came, a 
time of great enslavement and trouble. Judea 
was made a Roman province; men were allowed 
to buy and sell by peimission of the Roman 
Government. Men were musing in their hearts 
of the Messiah they were looking for. They 
were looking for Him, and if you take the his- 
tory of the kingdom of Jesus of Nazareth — and 
I will not dwell upon it at all — you have one 
who comes; and I said, and I want to say again, 
he has been accepted by the world as the ideal, 
perfect man. This much we can show as un- 
questionable. Men would question a great deal 
that I would say if I were to formulate state- 



296 The Witness of Jesus 

ments about his divinity, his humanity, the 
doctrine of the atonement, and all these things 
we have now in our creed, but when I mention 
the name of the great Man at the top of the 
world's apostolic history, every one will say, 
4 'This is a perfect man." No one has stood as 
high as he. When we have imagined, when 
we have in our thought and our imagination 
gone as far as we can toward perfection in life, 
in character, Mr. Huxley says — and he is the 
most skeptical of all men — if you take Jesus of 
Nazareth as the ideal man, that is all right. 
There is no question about that. And the great 
orientalists say, this life is entirely unap- 
proachable. Mr. Mill, the intellectual man, 
and the coldest skeptic that has lived in our 
generation, says the world has made no mistake 
in taking that Nazarene as the ideal man. 
There is to be an ideal in everything, and we 
have to have an ideal man, a perfect man. 
Now when we have a perfect man we have 
something more than a man. He is something 
more than a man to all of us. I have not time 
to go into the subject of the divine and the 
human side of man, but when you get a perfect 
man I wish to say that you get a perfect human 
and a perfect divine creation. And these men 
who were gathered about Jesus began to think 
he was that man. He said he was; we have 
here that statement, if we accept the language 



The Creed of the Church 297 

as the words of 'Christ in the conversation. 
"Thou art the Christ," said Peter, "the Son of 
the living God." Then Christ said: "Thou 
art Peter, and here I am going to build a 
church, a great gathering of people out of the 
world, on this ground." And He said to him, 
"You have not learned that from men; you have 
not found that out from flesh and blood. Men 
say I am John the Baptist; that I am simply 
one of the great teachers and leaders of man- 
kind. Men say that, but men did not tell you 
I am the Christ. Now, who taught you that? 
The infinite Father in heaven says, 'Thou art 
the Christ, the Son of the living God; flesh and 
blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my 
Father who is in heaven.' " 

Faith in Christ is necessarily the faith in 
Him as His Father reveals it. I want you to 
notice that. This is the reason I speak of the 
creed of the Church, the divine creed. If you 
have a conviction in your heart, you want to 
formulate it in words. Men have to do that. 
Here are new convictions established in the 
hearts of some men surrounding this man, and 
they said: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
living God." And He said, "That is my 
Father's formula, and it is a creed in which my 
life can be summed up and comprehended." 

The great church creed, therefore, is simply 
this — the Messiahship of Jesus. This becomes 



298 The Witness of Jesus 

the question of the most tremendous interest in 
the time in which we live. If you look at the 
discussions going on in the world among the 
best and purest of men, the most cultivated of 
men in all the higher circles of church life, the 
inquiry at the present time, all over the re- 
ligious world, everywhere, is, How shall we 
find a simple creed? We have made the best 
formulas we could; we have put them in the 
best form of expression we can give them; and 
after ages have gone on, and the minds of men 
have become enlarged, intelligence has grown, 
we see that our expressions were inadequate 
and some of them not true. And men become 
restless about it, and are asking, all over Europe 
and America, in every church in the world — for 
there is not a single one in the world to-day 
that has a creed with which it is satisfied — 
How can we find a simple expression that will 
comprehend the absolute truth? They are 
turning again to this utterance of Peter. I 
have seen in the last year, in the most culti- 
vated men in the different churches around me, 
a tendency to turn back and take this great 
creed of the heart and of the church, more than 
I have seen it in all the forty or fifty years that 
I can remember; and I have been reading these 
views. This is the tendency in our hearts, and 
we can see the reason of it very clearly. 

Men are beginning to understand this — that 



The Creed of the Church 299 

what we believe with the heart must be in a 
personality. You have been familiar, all our 
people have been familiar throughout all their 
history, with the difference between believing 
in a proposition, formulated in language, and 
believing in a personality. That is coming out 
now and becoming general. What you believe 
in is not zvords, nor propositions, but you believe 
in a personality . You want to formulate what 
you think about that person intellectually, and 
you will do that; no one can prevent your doing 
it; but in your heart, the thing we call your 
trust and confidence, your life, rests upon a per- 
sonality; it has never been a book. Men said 
to us, in all my earlier ministry, and they were 
honest, it was the way they looked at it, "Why, 
you don't have any creed; you people have gone 
and rejected all the creeds in Christendom, and 
now, no one knows what you believe. Why 
don't you get together and formulate your be- 
liefs and put them down; put them in a book 
like we have; put them in articles, and number 
them, and then the world would know you, 
would know what you say, think and believe?" 
My answer has been, all the time, that my 
creed is too vast a thing to be put in a book. I 
can put my thoughts, I can put my intellectual 
conceptions, in a book, but how can I put in a 
book the trust that my heart feels in a person? 
No book will hold that. It is too large and too 



300 The Witness of Jesus 

deep for a book that any one could make. You 
can put your thoughts and your conceptions 
down to-day. In twenty years from now you 
would want to state them differently. If you 
lived twenty years after that, you would want 
to make them still different. But your confi- 
dence in that personality is not changed. It 
may grow better and stronger. I confide in a 
friend j , I trust in a person; I believe his words 
are true; but my confidence is in him. It is 
the trust of one person in another. 

Now the church expressed the confidence of 
the human heart in Jesus Christ when Peter 
said, "Thou art the Christ." That is the voice 
of the human heart. Let me say that, not 
merely Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Daniel pre- 
dicted, but the human heart predicted, called 
for, and longed for this Christ through the ages. 
It was not merely what one human heart did, 
but what all human hearts have been groaning 
for through the everlasting ages, "Art thou He 
that should come?" Somebody must come, and 
I say, "Thou art He." 

Now we believe in Him, we believe in Christ. 
He is our creed. When Mr. Campbell and 
Barton Stone and those other men got together, 
and after the question had been raised, some 
owned one creed and some owned another, and 
they had outgrown these, like men are outgrow- 
ing all the creeds; and they said, "We cannot 



The Creed of the Church 301 

take these with us. We have faith in God, 
Christ, the Bible; we want to live these lives, 
but we won't accept all of these creeds nor any 
of them. Many things in them are true; all of 
them are in part true; they were great and 
good souls that gave utterance to these great 
creeds. 1 ' It was not because they thought they 
were void, but they were inadequate. They 
said, We cannot accept them. What shall we 
build upon? A man must believe something to 
become a member of the church, and that some- 
thing must be acknowledged. There is to be a 
line, on which a man stands, which he shall 
cross from one kingdom into the other, and it is 
the ground of faith. What shall it be? And 
after looking into this vast field of churches and 
church life, and church creeds and the New 
Testament, they said, "We will just simply 
confess our faith in Christ and our churches 
shall be built that way." We have made mis- 
takes and may make mistakes again, because 
we are men, but I think we know we are right 
here on this position that we have taken; and 
this position is now ready to be sanctioned by 
the whole Christian world. It has not been 
long since the most brilliant light in the Epis- 
copal Church in America, in his examination of 
this whole question, said: "Why can't we all 
get together on the simple confession of faith 
in Christ? We can have our opinions about as 



302 The Witness of Jesus 

definite, as to His relations here and there, as 
men have formulated them, in one way and an- 
other, but let us take as our creed that broad, 
deep utterance of the human soul, in this ideal, 
glorious and divine person." And that is the 
tendency of men now. This is the confession, 
the creed. Twenty or thirty years ago, as this 
truth came to me, and I began to understand it, 
and when my brethren were, many of them, 
preaching that the Bible is our creed, as some 
do yet, I said, "The New Testament is my 
creed." But I began to see that the New Tes- 
tament did not contain my creed, but that I must 
take Christ as my creed. I had a great deal of 
criticism here and there among the preachers, 
because it spoiled a good many theories, taking 
a position like that. All that I want the New 
Testament for is to show me how to believe in 
my creed. Christ is the creed of the heart; He 
is the creed of the soul; men believe in Him; 
and I want this gospel to show me how to be- 
lieve in Him. It is not simply to believe the 
gospel; I may believe the gospel to be true, but 
to believe in Christ is another thing. I need 
some one that can help me, and I need, too, a 
friend. When I am financially embarrassed, 
and about to be turned out in the world which 
is selfish, I need one who can help me. Sup- 
pose some one were to formulate for me some 
theories from the advanced views now preva- 



The Creed of the Church 303 

lent in political economy, the best rules about 
making money, and tell me just to follow these 
right down, and I will come out all right! I 
would feel mocked. My heart would feel hurt. 
I do not want a book; I want a ?nan. I want a 
living heart; I want a soul — a man that can put 
his hand in his pocket, and get me out of this 
trouble. If I am sick and suffering and threat- 
ened with death, I send for a physician, and he 
sends me a book. He says, I know your case 
and here are the rules; if you go by these rules 
it will cure you. I do not want any book; I do 
not want any rules. I want a man; I want 
some one that can just feel my pulse and diag- 
nose my case, and get this disease out of me. 
And I know, when I am mortal and sinning and 
imperfect, I want some one that can help me, not 
tell me the doctrines of the church. I tell you, 
just like I tell the physician, I do not want your 
book; I want a helper. I am going to be lost 
unless some one can get me out of this; I want 
to find him. I have had occasion to speak, so 
many times in my life, in vindication of this 
position. I have been called to the side of so 
many dying people, both saints and sinners — as 
many, I presume, as any man of my age in the 
world; and I have never heard a dying man ask 
for a creed in my life. I have never heard a 
man that is letting go his hold on this world, 
and going into the unseen, ask for the doctrines 



304 The Witness of Jesus 

of anybody's church. He doesn't need them. 
He wants somebody that goes with him through 
that change, or that brings him back from the 
dead to the living. His heart wants a Savior, 
a loving Savior, and He is the creed of the 
church. 

Now I do not make war at all on the great 
creeds of Christendom, because they are inev- 
itable; and what is inevitable is providential. 
Each one was born out of the thought of its 
time. These men did the best they knew in 
their day. They had faith in Christ, and they 
formulated that faith in those books, and they 
said, "If you join our church you must think as 
we think." That is the trouble. They thought 
they were right, and were perfectly sincere; 
whether it be the Westminster, or the Thirty- 
Nine Articles, or whether it be the Doctrine of 
the Discipline, all are equally honest and sin- 
cere in their theories. They put down their 
conceptions; they tried to express the thought 
in their hearts about God, Christ and the Bible 
in so many propositions. And they say now, 
"You must take this intellectual conception of 
these principles if you join our church." But 
the world is getting tired of that. The world 
is getting a little beyond that now. It is out-* 
growing that, and this is the reason of the vast 
unrest about us. The creed of the church is 
Christ, and that creed was formulated accord- 






The Creed of the Church 305 

ing to Jesus, by the everlasting Father, "Thou 
art the Christ, the Son of the living God. ' ' And 
that is the reason why, as you were told re- 
cently, the name Christian was given to the 
church. 

This is all the time I have to talk to you 
about the creeds. These creeds are called Con- 
fessions of Faith. Now a creed is one thing, 
and the confession of it is another thing. Now 
the simple question is, when the church was 
formed, and when the people joined it, what did 
they confess? We have the history of the first 
300 years; that we know; nobody questions 
that. There is hardly any debate about it; they 
simply confessed their faith in Christ. They 
said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the liv- 
ing God," up to A. D. 325. I know we have 
now what is called the Apostles' Creed, said to 
have been made by the twelve apostles. They 
were all together one day — that is the tradition 
that has come down to us — and one said, "I 
believe in God the Father," and another said, 
"I believe in the Holy Spirit," etc., and that is 
called the "Apostles' Creed." But we know, 
now, that it was not made by the apostles at all. 
And yet this has been consecrated, and made 
the basis of church life, assuming the apostles 
to have made it. It was an attempt to have a 
creed, that the apostles' confession was formu- 
lated; and men wanted to believe they had a 
20 



306 The Witness of Jesus 

divine creed so intensely that they accepted 
that. And every creed in the world has been 
made long since the apostles were dead. But 
here we have a creed which Jesus says was made 
by the everlasting Father. Flesh and blood did 
not formulate it. When men speak about Jesus 
they say this and that and the other, but when 
God speaks about him, He says: "The Christ, 
the Son of the living God." I have a creed, there- 
fore, formulated by the everlasting Father that 
fully satisfies me. It is to me beyond all creeds. 
Now in the early dawn of the church, for the 
first 300 years, that was its creed. The first 
human creed was at the Council of Nice, which 
was in the year 325 — in the fourth century. 
Men had debated for at least 200 years about all 
these questions as to the human and the divine, 
and the Greeks were debating; they were an in- 
tellectual people. At Alexandria the Greeks 
and Romans discussed it, and then they sum- 
moned the whole world together and put down 
their intellectual conceptions. That made the 
Nicene Creed, in the fourth century. But the 
church had been already organized, and men 
had been joining it on the simple confession of 
"Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living 
God." How could it be otherwise? Just use 
your common sense in regard to it. Read these 
four Gospels: Here is this great and living One 
saying, "I am the Christ, the Son of the living 



The Creed of the Church 307 

God." If I am going to confess, I will confess 
that. It cannot be anything else; in the very 
nature of the case it ought to be that. And 
that is the reason why the Apostle Paul, in his 
day, said, If a man will confess the Lord Jesus, 
believing in his heart that God raised him from 
the dead, he shall be saved. One of the great 
points preached by that apostle everywhere was, 
"For, with the heart man believeth unto right- 
eousness, and with the mouth confession is 
made unto salvation." That was the way it 
was formulated in St. Paul's time, and so stated 
by all the commentators on that verse since. 
The statement is made candidly that, in the 
early church, when men confessed their faith, 
they confessed Christ. "Thou art the Christ, 
the Son of the living God." This was their 
confession of faith. It is called "the good con- 
fession," and it is that; it is so simple; it is so 
real; it means so much. A child can see it. 
He knows little of what it means; he is in the 
Sunday-school; his character and his heart are 
drawn to that life that is so above himself. He 
needs somebody to help him to attain this pure, 
holy truth; and he says, "Thou art the Christ, 
the Son of the living God." Thou art the One 
to teach me; thou art the One to atone for me 
and save me. Thou art the One to get me from 
the cross and bring me to thy kingdom. A 
child can see that. And yet, as he goes on liv- 



308 The Witness of Jesus 

ing, as his mind is unfolded, as he looks at the 
universe and studies all science; as he looks up 
at God, and looks at the human heart, the 
deeper meaning of it occurs to him; it is ex- 
panding, enlarging. I did not know much 
about the meaning of my creed when I first 
heard it, when I was about seventeen years old. 
It has grown, but it is the same creed now that 
it was then, because, as one of His inspired fol- 
lowers said, "He is the same yesterday, to-day 
and for ever"; and we trust Him through all 
eternity. The confession of faith is like that. 
I have no objection to your giving utterance to 
it in any way you can. I might agree with 
you; I might differ from you, and our differ- 
ences, if we discuss them in Christian sympathy 
and light, may lead us higher. Why, that is the 
way to grow. When, in the old Christian days, 
a church had got together and expressed its con- 
victions, its mental conceptions of Christ, they 
put that down, and then said to each other, 
1 'He that doth not believe this is an infidel and 
not a Christian, and cannot join our church.' ' 
That day is gone. Now these men, who accept 
these creeds, are looking one to another in these 
days of science, and saying, "Let us compare 
our views; let us restate these convictions; let 
us see if we cannot get a better and more intel- 
ligent conception of God's thought." Men all 
the time are doing that. The great mind of 



The Creed of the Church 309 

man is going on yet. That is the creed that 
gives the name to this chnrch; it is a divine 
thing. The world is growing, outgrowing these 
old conceptions, and I believe the time will 
come when they will all be done away. The 
religion of the future will be the Christian re- 
ligion; it will be more Christian than it has 
ever been. It will be a faith in the Christ and 
a love for the Christ; it will be a large under- 
standing of the Christ; it will be a more whole- 
hearted trust in Him, as God has revealed Him- 
self to the world in Him. Religion is growing 
that way; we begin to see the dawning now of 
a better day. Men will get closer together. 
This confession of faith will bring hearts to- 
gether, and then intellects will get together; 
and we shall have one creed, after a while, and 
one confession of faith, to join the church; and 
then we will have Christian men comparing 
their opinions and views about it, growing, en- 
larging, advancing with the advance of the 
knowledge of the world. 

This is the reason why it is, as I have had 
occasion to say in our meetings so often, that 
the soul of man stands up and says, "Thou art 
the Christ, the Son of the living God." It is 
the sublimest and divinest thing it ever did. 
The man that has thought of the world, loved 
the world, gets his mind turned upward toward 
God and his heart gladdened. He says, I am 



310 The Witness of Jesus 

going to leave this world; I am going to stand 
before that perfect and glorious ideal, and say, 
Thou art to me the life, Thou art to me the 
Christ, the Son of the living God. From that 
moment Christ stands in the human heart as the 
eternal pivot in the wheel on which it turns 
from one to the other. Those of you that have 
said that, brethren and sisters — I have seen it 
tried so many times; I know what I am talking 
about — when you come to the closing hour, and 
look back over your life, that which was the 
sweetest thing and the truest was the day you 
made that confession. You want to remember 
it. Like the apostles who brought it up in 
their epistles, when they talked and wrote to 
the churches afterwards, you want to remember 
it. You will want to think of it as you go out 
of this world into the next. As you go you 
meet, face to face, the reality of all that is 
there; you feel that you are standing, rock-like 
and strong. God help you to trust Him and to 
love Him, and at last to all meet Him in the 
world beyond ! 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

As he was saying, "Thou art the Christ, the 
Son of the living God," he said, "Blessed art 
thou." These are his words to everyone who 



The Creed of the Church 311 

comes saying that. If we have come and taken 
the name upon us, and pledged our hearts to 
trust in Him, He says, ' 'Remember me." Now 
He will give you a central look, always, a look 
at the heart itself. If you will place yourself 
in perfect sympathy with Him, with Jesus, He 
will show you the heart of the great and infinite 
Father, when you come to this institution. 
The look of the soul is at Him, through Him, 
and in this way the love of the everlasting 
Father comes to so many people, and they say, 
"Thou art the Christ," and they are brought 
into this blessed fellowship. This is the fellow- 
ship we are always sharing. That is what He 
means when He says, "If I be lifted up, I will 
draw all men unto me." He is drawing them 
still. 

O, what infinite love! How it draws the 
world and men to-day; draws them toward 
Himself! We want to feel that power, realize 
that drawing, day by day, as the years go by, 
by drawing closer and closer to Him. Let us 
thank God for this blessed privilege. 



XVII 

THE BAPTISMAL FORMULA- 
ITS SIGNIFICANCE 

And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power 
is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, 
and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the 
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. — Matt. 
28:19. 

I am to speak to you this morning on the 
public formula of baptism. I am not going to 
preach to you a sermon on baptism, but this 
will be a good preparation for the discussion of 
that question. I will say this to you, however, 
that I was about to take up this subject, when 
the little breeze sprang up two or three weeks 
ago on that question, in the community, occa- 
sioned by the delivery of a sermon in one of the 
pulpits, and I therefore deferred it, because I 
did not wish to be understood as taking up this 
subject in any relation whatever to that contro- 
versy. In the line of discussion in which I 
have been engaged, representing my own con- 
ception of the Christian religion, this subject 
would necessarily occur in one part, and I wish 
to talk to you this morning about the meaning 
of this formula. 

Go ye, therefore, and teach, or disciple, all 

the nations, baptizing them into, not "in," the 
312 



The Baptismal Formula 313 

name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
the Holy Spirit. In the first place we have 
brought before us, in this remarkable passage, 
a set of relations, the most significant, the most 
profound in their meaning to us, of any view 
that I can take of the religion of Jesus Christ. 
Christianity itself realized, is simply the enjoy- 
ment of the relations of this new fellowship. It 
has been said, on the moral side of our nature, 
that our obligations all grow out of relations; 
and this is true. It is very easy for every one 
to realize that, just by thinking of the relations 
in which he stands. What we owe to the peo- 
ple at home grows out of our relations to them 
as father, mother and child. What we owe to 
the State grows out of our relations to it as citi- 
zens. And what we owe to the Church grows 
out of our relations to each other and to Christ 
in that organization. But these latter are so 
high and vast they seem vague. But they are 
expressed in this baptismal formula. And the 
reason why I am talking about it now is, it is 
like so many of the richest, the highest, the 
grandest things in the religion of Christ, it has 
had the whole meaning taken out of it. It has 
been made into a sort of talisman, held over a 
person in form, and then they try to imagine 
something that it would do for them in the 
future. This has been one of the misfortunes 
that has fallen upon the religion of Christ, a 



314 The Witness of Jesus 

religion of principles — principles understood and 
felt, and meant to be from the beginning to the 
end. But we take its great living principles, 
its life, and its breath, to be understood and felt 
by every member of it, and make them a form; 
and we have done that pretty much — both 
Protestants and Catholics— ^with this baptismal 
formula. I shall have occasion to speak moie 
in regard to this when I speak further with ref- 
erence to its meaning — the meaning of baptism 
itself. I am speaking now of the meaning of 
the baptismal formula. 

We have here brought to our view, by the 
great Teacher, the highest relations that the 
soul can know, in these words, Father, Son and 
Holy Spirit. The world has been trying, from 
the time Christianity came, to form some intel- 
ligent conception of what these terms indicate 
to us. We have metaphysical discussions about 
the relations of the three, and these metaphys- 
ical discussions are beyond the understanding of 
most people. I confess to you, frankly, that I 
never understood them. I have begun a long 
time ago, in my study, with the time when 
these forms began at the Council of Nice, and 
have come on down, and never have got an in- 
telligent conception from the technical lan- 
guage of the schools, applied to God, the 
Father, and to Christ and to the Spirit. I can 
get some idea of one of these forms, "God the 



The Baptismal Formula 315 

Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy 
Spirit," when I look at it, as it seems to me 
here represented. When I look at the universe 
outside and its meaning, its arrangement, its 
order, its thought, its plan, its relations to me, 
and my relations to it, I can understand some- 
thing about the infinite Being who shows Him- 
self to me in all this tremendous and vast 
arrangement — God. I can understand that He 
is a Father. The world tried to understand 
that a long time, to understand at least its rela- 
tions to Him and His relations to it, through 
centuries, ages; but there was no word, father, 
in its conception. But, as I said to you on an- 
other occasion, and shall have occasion to say to 
you again, on another subject, the two sides of 
the universe are so perfectly balanced to a finite 
being, that men are left, as they think of God, 
with the unsettled question forever in their 
mind. When you study Him as you have to 
study Him, as the Jews have been compelled to 
do, as all people, all races, have thought and 
are still thinking, of the pleasure on the one 
side and unhappiness and misery on the other; 
good on the one side and evil on the other, this 
old problem of God's nature confronts you. 
When you read the Old Testament you will find 
the religious feeling rising to its highest point 
of worship, in a race divinely led as the people 
unfolded their loyal and religious nature to the 



3 16 The Witness of Jesus 

very highest point, looking at God as they could 
see him; but they were never able to say, 
1 'Father." There was as much sickness as 
health; just as much pain as pleasure; just as 
much darkness as light; just as much sorrow as 
joy; just as much want as riches, and more; just 
as much death as life in the world, and if they 
ventured when they had pleasure and joy, and 
health and activity, success and victory and life, 
to say that God loved them, what of the ab- 
sence of these things? We know now He loves 
us; all the sunshine, beauty and health, spring- 
ing up in our land; the springtime, with its 
promise and glory and beauty; the summer 
time with its growth and the autumn with its 
inspiration; God loves us. But then we are 
compelled to look at the other side; and there 
is pain; there is sorrow; there is disappoint- 
ment; there is drouth; there is sickness; there 
is poverty and mourning and dying. There 
are these two classes of things, just equal, and 
this one proves to me that the Author of the 
universe is dealing with me through it and 
loves me; the other proves that the same in- 
finite Author is dealing with me through the 
universe, and hates me, and the man is eter- 
nally gravitating one way or the other. We are 
left with the question unsettled. It was neces- 
sary that man should know that God loves him; 
and he could not know that by studying the 



The Baptismal Formula 317 

universe. It does not say so. It can tell its 
vastness, its wisdom, its order and all that, but 
it needed a tongue behind it; it needed one that 
knew; it needed some one that would come 
down from heaven and say, "My home is in 
heaven, and I know the Father and He loves 
you." We needed to have this truth underly- 
ing the new dispensation: "God so loved the 
world." We needed somebody to say that to us, 
and then to explain all that other side to us, so 
that we can see it does not contradict it. Well, 
that One has come. He has lived his life with 
these men. He has projected himself as far as 
he can upon their thought and upon their heart, 
by his working and teaching among them. 
And now, when it has been consummated, and 
the great act has been finished, in which God 
has shown to the human heart His love, these 
men were gathered together, and Jesus says, 
"Go into all the world, and teach the nations." 
They need teaching. They need to understand 
themselves, God, and their relationship to Him. 
"Go, teach the nations, baptizing them into 
the name of the Father, and of the Son. and of 
the Holy Spirit." 

Now this is implied, that whatever relations 
man stood in to God, as He showed Himself to 
the human mind, to the human heart, through 
the universe, another relation is needed — a 
closer and more intimate one. I can stand in 



3 18 The Witness of Jesus 

relation to Him as the Creator, the moral Gov- 
ernor and Director of all this vast universe. I 
can fear, sometimes rejoice, and worship. But 
the nations of old were not that way. They 
are called in this book Jews and Gentiles, some- 
times the Jews and the Greeks. The object 
was to bring them from the relation in which 
they then stood to a new one; and they want to 
be taken up from that relation they then sus- 
tained, to God, on the higher side of their 
nature, and be brought into a new relationship 
with God; and He simply presents the means 
by which this is done. Here were Greeks with 
their conceptions of the universe as they had 
worked it out the best they could in a thousand 
years. They had about a thousand years of the 
highest intellectual development — natural and 
mental development — the world ever saw, on 
this very problem; and we have their conception 
of it in their literature. We know what they 
thought and how they felt; how the visions of 
the sea, and the earth, and the stream were all 
about them. And we know that about the 
Jews, how they felt as if standing in relation 
simply to a great Lawgiver, a constitution 
maker, commanding men to do this and to do 
that, and not to do this and not to do that. 
They were worshiping the God of Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob, and talked of the majesty, the 
power and grandeur of the infinite One, as they 



The Baptismal Formula 319 

sang in their psalms. And now He wants them 
brought into relationship with God as Father — 
His children. "Go and teach all nations; you 
have seen me; you know me; you have been in 
my presence; go show to their minds, their 
thoughts, their hearts, this new life, this new 
view of God, the Father. We want them to 
see that; we want them to feel that. You will 
have to show to them how this was revealed. 
You will have to tell them who did it, and that 
he was the Son — the Son of man and the Son 
of God." God was thus showing Himself to 
human thought through the universe, and 
showing Himself to the heart of man in this 
life of Jesus. That is, God the Father and God 
the Son. That is all I know about it. 

When I look at this whole universe around 
me and above me, outside of myself, I can see 
some conception — a vague one — of the vast, 
infinite Mind. And now, Jesus has said to me, 
that is my Father. He tells me that He loves 
me with an infinite, changeless, eternal love. I 
can know that only by His showing Himself to 
me in a loving manner. God has been showing 
Himself all the way through these nations, here 
and there, in broken lights to humanity. St. 
Paul says they were feeling after Him, all the 
time, "if perhaps they might find Him." 
Jesus, Son of God, and the Son of man — He 
came to reveal Him. We can get into our 



320 The Witness of Jesus 

thought something of what the Nazarene meant 
when he called himself the Son of man — He 
was not the son of a man — of Joseph or any- 
body else — but the Son of man. No, it is as a 
man, representing the whole race; as the Son of 
man, God shows Himself to men. He sent the 
Son. But he lives, as I do; he comes, as I 
came; he is my brother, and points me to the 
Father, the infinite Father; and tells me of my 
relationship to Him as the Father, and my duty 
as a son. 

Now, then, how can this be done? It can 
only be done by teaching. You must have 
some power by which you can make a human 
mind see this. To show it to the eye of the 
soul, it requires some one who knows and can 
tell truth about God and about man. And then 
when the infinite God of all this universe, just 
one God, the Father of all, comes to me in the 
form of truth, illuminating my reason and in- 
tellect, and shining all through my conscious- 
ness, giving me thought and understanding, 
heart and love and peace; that is God the 
Spirit. He comes speaking. He comes un- 
folding Himself to me in a form which my in- 
tellect alone can take in. He has constituted 
the human intellect so that it gets what it has 
through the forms of expression and speech. 
And therefore the Spirit of God, for that is who 
it was, was teaching these twelve men. Now 



The Baptismal Formula 321 

you have the whole conception of God, if you 
look at it as they had it before Christ came, and 
look at it now as He is unfolded to us, as the 
vast, infinite, glorious Father of humanity, 
showing Himself to us in a man who is the Son 
of man, your brother and mine, thinking, act- 
ing, speaking, feeling as we do, in touch with 
us. And now that He is no longer visible, He 
comes to us as thought ; He comes to us as un- 
derstanding; He comes to us as religious feel- 
ing; He comes to us as sensibility, put into the 
forms of words and methods and visions we 
may apprehend — the teaching of the Spirit. 
Now, said Jesus to his apostles, you will go into 
all the world, and take these men as they are 
there, and bring them into true relations to God, 
as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 
Now this is the plan of Jesus as I understand 
it, and what a vast enterprise it is! I wish I 
could get it before you in a clearer way. But 
this is the significance of the baptismal 
formula. This is what the apostles were to do. 
Their work in this world was to change the re- 
lations of men, and to have them stand in the 
community in a new set of relations. 

In Christendom, all men know something 
now about God, about the Christ, and about the 
Spirit; but men are not all in right relation to 
Him. In Christendom, even, the vast majority 

of men are in relation to the earth; they were 
21 



322 The Witness of Jesus 

born in these natural relations, were born of 
flesh and blood, having these human relation- 
ships as parents, brothers and sisters. By the 
same natural birth we came into these relations 
that we owe to the State and society about us. 
But we cannot be born that way into these 
higher relations. It takes another and a higher 
birth. A man must be taken up in spiritual 
life, in his body, flesh, blood, bones and nerves, 
and put into relationship with the man within- 
him — that in him which he knows to be man- 
hood — thinking and feeling. Something has to 
be done with that to take it up out of these old 
relations it sustains to this world. We take 
men in the world, the vast majority of them, 
and they have just a conception of their rela- 
tions to the world, and you want to put them 
in a state of higher relationship, of soul and 
life, to God the Father, to Christ the Son, to 
the Holy Spirit who thinks and teaches, who 
leads, guides, comforts, and shows you what 
you are. Now, suppose this is being done. 
Humanity, while it is in the body, while it has 
its material organism, wants some pledge so 
that the mind can know it has passed from one 
set of relations into the other; I cannot see any 
other way. A man cannot sit down and place 
himself in a new set of relations. Some ar- 
rangement must be made by which a man 
knows when he crosses the line from one set of 



The Baptismal Formula 323 

relations into the other. And this is given to 
us by the Apostle Paul as a test. The old set 
of relations he calls "the old man" — the man 
with the thought of the world, who loved the 
world and lived in the world as the world was, 
as it is now. There was a time, he says, when 
you loved that, and thought about it; for a long 
time the mind was satisfied; then the heart and 
then the will were changed, and you moved 
from one side into the other. And this situa- 
tion, the apostle says, is the line at which you 
will transfer your energies from one set of rela- 
tions to the other. You are a new man on this 
side; you were an old man on that. That is 
the way the apostle treats it when he writes 
about baptism. And now the Savior tells them, 
"Go into all the world and teach all nations." 
Disciple them is the deeper word. When they 
have been taught, baptize them. When the 
teaching has grasped the intellect, when the 
nature of God is shown in Christ, when the 
spirit of God is shown in you, when it has 
taken hold of the spiritual man, then it trans- 
fers a man into these relations. The public 
formula in baptism means that. The mind, as 
well as the body, is to be baptized into the 
Father, into the Son and into the Holy Spirit. 
In this new state men are looking at God as 
Father, at Jesus as the elder brother and Savior, 
at the Spirit as the Teacher, Guide and Com- 



324 The Witness of Jesus 

forter. The baptismal formula is thus seen to 
be a significant thing. What I have said con- 
cerning it, you can readily see, does not har- 
monize with the way it is looked at by vast 
numbers of good people, Christian people, too. 
Let this formula be used for something that has 
no intellect, no sensibility, no will, can appre- 
hend nothing, sees nothing, is not capable of 
sustaining this relationship at all — and what 
confusion is produced! Now Jesus sends to us 
these words of admonition in this great commis- 
sion. I am not talking about the form of bap- 
tism now at all; I am not going to discuss that 
to-day. But does it mean God the Father — 
does it convey that thought into the heart, or 
anything about the brotherhood of Jesus Christ? 
Does it mean anything about' the great world of 
light that shines from the very heaven of 
heavens down into the heart through the teach- 
ing of the Spirit, when used upon unconscious 
infants? Don't you see, cannot everyone see 
when he thinks of it, that this is simply a talis- 
man pronounced over a person in the hope that 
some day, when the mind can think, and when 
the heart can feel, and the will can act, this 
may possibly have something to do with its 
salvation? Why, you know that, if you know 
anything. We know that religion is not a 
mysticism, a fetich nor a talisman; it is what 
we think about God; it is what we feel and do 



The Baptismal Formula 325 

for Him; that is religion. And when one uses 
this formula as I have seen it used, he takes the 
whole meaning out of it. Now, perhaps it is 
true that in a majority of cases here in this 
world in which the ordinance of baptism is ad- 
ministered, it is just in that way, and that is 
the reason it means nothing; that is why the 
greatest intellect, nearly, of this century, who 
administered baptism in any way a man would 
ask, in his great honest heart, after giving it 
all study from a personal standpoint that he 
knew how to give, just said candidly, "I do not 
see a thing in the world in it." That is the 
way the great body of the world looks at it now; 
they do not see anything in it. 

Is there anything in an act of yours, of which 
you are conscious, in which you are transferred 
from one set of relations into the other? Does 
that mean nothing? Is there anything signifi- 
cant in an act by which you are conscious that 
you are taken up from one state and put in an- 
other state, and, after this, you stand in a rela- 
tionship to God, to Christ, and to the Spirit, 
in which you never stood before? The bap- 
tismal formula means that, and if we look at it 
in that way, then it will not be pronounced - 
lightly. It will not be made a denominational 
something — a mere church something. I shall 
have to say this, that I know of nothing possi- 
ble to a man on this planet, that means half as 



326 The Witness of Jesus 

much as the language of this tremendous 
formula, that takes a man's mind, a man's 
moral nature, a man's will, and grasps it by the 
truth of the life of Christ Jesus, transfers it 
from one set of relations into the other, so that 
a man can say, Now I am standing in a new 
relation to the Father, a new relation to the 
Son, and a new relation to the Spirit of God, a 
new relation to Christianity and to the world. 
I understand that to be the significance of this 
wonderful formula. And this is the reason why 
I think we should understand it, why we should 
not trifle with it, to suit our prejudices, our 
whims or anything else. We should not belittle 
it. As I shall show you, we should not make a 
little rite of it, and call it a Christian rite, a 
ceremony, and call it a Christian ceremony, to 
the human mind meaning nothing, to the 
human life meaning nothing. But is there 
anything in the soul of man, in its real religious 
life, in its thought, feeling and action, that 
means anything? And how does that meaniug 
come otherwise than as a consciousness of hav- 
ing come into real relationship unto God as 
Father, to Christ, who has brought us into that 
relationship, as brother, and to the Holy Spirit 
of infinite truth, talking to his reason and to 
his consciousness, and always in God's way, 
revealing man unto himself; revealing the 
Father more and more to him? It is this sig- 



The Baptismal Formula 327 

nificance of baptism to Christian men to which 
these apostles always referred when they bap- 
tized men, and pointed to that fact to awaken 
in their hearts a consciousness of this relation, 
so high, so sublime, so divine, in which God 
has placed us. In this relation to Him, as 
Father, the human heart can then say, as Jesus 
said, when he prayed, "Our Father." That is 
where it comes to us, and every thought, act 
and movement we have after that is filled with 
a new significance. The very light that comes 
down from the mind of God is poured into every 
single act of your worship as long as you live. 



REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE. 

After this new relation of which we have 
been speaking, about our faith and about our 
transfer into the name of the Father, Son, and 
Holy Spirit, how appropriate and beautiful 
comes this evidence of the love of God, the 
Father to His children! And if we are children, 
then heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. 
At the home is the deepest joy the heart knows. 
This feast of love is always there provided, in 
the Father's house, for the children in the 
church. That is what this communion means. 
It gives it divine significance; it makes us con- 
scious of the relations in which we have been 



328 The Witness of Jesus 

placed. It makes us conscious whence they 
came, and how they came. It makes us con- 
scious of where we are attempting to go, and 
why we are looking forward with hope. Let 
this fellowship, this blessed communion, this 
closeness of God's children to Himself and to 
one another, this great life of the soul, which 
we have with the living and with the dead, of 
one blessed family of communion, be maintained 
while the church stands. May God help us to 
realize in it all the blessing it was intended to 
convey to us! 



XVIII 

CHRISTIAN BAPTISM— ITS 
MEANING 

Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into 
Jesus Christ, were baptized into his death? Therefore we 
are buried with him by baptism into death; that like as 
Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, 
even so we also should walk in newness of life. — Rom. 6: 
3,4- 

I rkad in your hearing in the opening serv- 
ice the 6th chapter of the Roman letter. The 
subject I am going to discuss this morning is 
baptism. The view which I have of this sub- 
ject, of which I can only give a small part in 
one sermon, is not new to you. It seems to 
me that the old controversy which raged so 
long about the subject, the mode, the design, 
of the administration of baptism, has about run 
its course. I do not mean to say that these 
discussions were not necessary. They had 
their place in the progress of religious thought. 
But issues on any subject come up, and in a 
generation or two they go down again. The 
leaders in these discussions on the subject of 
baptism have dealt very largely with the mean- 
ing of the Greek words, simply working on 
definitions of words, and dictionaries and 
authorities. If the question is to be de- 
termined that way, we have it all. Schol- 
329 



330 The Witness of Jesus 

ars on different sides of this question 
have had their two or three hundred years to 
hunt up everything that men knew; and I be- 
lieve that every use of the word in ancient 
Greek has been sifted and examined, and the 
literature of it is so abundant that it is accessi- 
ble to every one who wants to see it. Indeed I 
have known men both among my own people 
and among others, who have gone before an 
audience on the subject of baptism and enter- 
tained them an hour with explanations, who 
did not know a single word of Greek. This 
catalogue-learning had become distasteful to me 
and I thought that there must be a deeper view 
of this question. The only thing that is worth 
anything to me in religion at all is, what does it 
mean? What relation does it have to my life — 
my religious thought, feeling and action? I 
care very little about the exactness of a word 
just as regards the shell, the outside; I have 
spent enough years of my early life making 
myself familiar with them. Every question and 
thought of religion has an inside, and my way 
of looking at it is to ask, What does it mean? 
What is its nature? And if from this I can 
determine its form, all right. I will not discuss 
these words now; that has already been done. 
I will discuss the nature of baptism. What 
kind of a thing is it? What does it mean to 
the people, to the church? And out of this all 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 331 

its forms will emerge; and I would like to get 
rid of that word "mode" if I could. 

Every law, political and religious, is derived 
from the system of things to which it belongs, 
of which it forms a part. In our country we 
have a government, for instance. It is a very 
distinct one in its differences from that of Rus- 
sia. It has a certain genius and spirit. It had 
its origin in a different way; it means a differ- 
ent thing to every subject. Now if you ask me 
about any of the acts, forms, laws and customs, 
I will tell you they come from the nature of our 
government; from the system of which they 
are a part. If you take something from Rus- 
sia, something having the nature of the gov- 
ernment of the Czar — of absolutism, for in- 
stance, and put it into ours, it would not fit, 
and every legislature in the country, congress 
and senate would say that it would be at home 
in Russia, but it does not belong here. If an 
act comes up for some purpose in the legisla- 
tures, that is just the way they look at it. Is it 
arbitrary? It is not in harmony with the con- 
stitution. Now what I want to say about this 
ordinance of baptism is, that it belongs to the 
Christian dispensation; it belongs to the reign 
of Christ. We have two dispensations of relig- 
ion, as distinct as the government of Russia 
and that of the United States, in the Bible. 
We have there a religion of law, purely, and 



332 The Witness of Jesus 

we have there a religion of faith, purely. 
When you come to the Old Testament every- 
thing is done because the statute commands it; 
when you come to the New Testament every- 
thing is done because that thing springs out of 
faith in the human heart; these two forms of 
religion are very different from each other. 

Now, then, the nature of Christian baptism 
will depend upon the nature of the dispensation 
to which it belongs, and that is the dispensa- 
tion of faith, and not of law. This was the 
first phase of the controversy that came to my 
mind. If I may be pardoned for a personal al- 
lusion, I have had more preachers come to me 
in the last twenty years and thank me for plac- 
ing the subject before them in that light, than 
for any other thing I have ever done. There 
was a time when we all had a sermon — old 
preachers and young, on what is called positive 
law. Now positive law is something settled 
by statute. I will not go over the history of 
that sermon. I know where it originated and 
it was preached in order to avoid a difficulty. 
It led us into a great deal of error in that sense. 
There is nothing of the sort in Christianity at 
all; there is no statute in it; it rests on princi- 
ple, and every act which is Christian under the 
reign of Christ, grows out of faith that is in the 
heart of the actor. Let men have religion with 
no faith in it, and it does not mean anything. 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 333 

I wish we could get the whole meaning of that. 
Every act under the reign of Christ that is a 
valid act, has its root in the faith of the heart 
of him who does it. The reign of Christ is the 
reign of faith; it is called so in the New Testa- 
ment. There was no requirement of faith in 
order for a man to be a Jew; the only thing 
needed was to be born of Jewish parents and to 
be circumcised when he was eight days old; 
then, in order to get the blessing of the Church 
in which he had been born, and in which he 
had been marked, he was required to keep the 
statutes that Moses gave. Into the Christian 
church no man can be born of his father and 
mother; it excludes such a thing. He knows 
why he acts, and he believes, and the act by 
which he becomes a member of Christ's body, 
is an act' of faith, and an act of faith is not of 
that kind which belonged to the Old Testa- 
ment. I do not mean to say, of course, that 
there were not men in the Old Testament who 
believed in God, but it was not a condition of 
membership, of belonging to the commonwealth 
of Israel and enjoying all its rights, faith and 
character. 

Now you can see, I think, from that, that 
nothing in the religion of Christ can have the 
nature of a rite or a ceremony. Under the Old 
Testament if you touched a dead man the law 
required you to go through a certain form of 



334 The Witness of Jesus 

purification; you must wash your clothes and 
all that, that you might stand right before God. 
That was a ceremony and a rite. There was 
no relation whatever between the thing you 
were doing and the end accomplished. It was 
just simply an arbitrary thing appointed by 
law. So it was with the rite of circumcision; 
there was no relation whatever between that 
and an act of man's religious faith. It only 
made him a member of a certain community 
that he could grow up in. In religious rites 
and ceremonies there is no relation between 
what you do and any religious purpose that you 
are seeking. You perform the rite because you 
are commanded to do it, and if you obey that 
command you have fulfilled the law. That is 
the nature of a rite. And I take the ground, 
and I am perfectly confident it is a solid, ten- 
able ground, that in the religion of Jesus Christ 
there are no rites or ceremonies whatever. I 
have said it, and I say it again after twenty 
years of religious thought, that if baptism is a 
rite or a ceremony, I could not accept it myself, 
or administer it to anybody else. I will admin- 
ister no rite or ceremony to anybody, and I will 
receive no rites or ceremonies from any church 
in the world. I know the idea that some men 
have about ritualism, that anything that is out- 
ward is a rite. That is all a mistake. Prayer 
is an outward thing. But if you are not pray- 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 335 

ing on account of your needs, you will see that 
it is a ceremony before God. You have bodily 
needs and ask for them to be supplied; you do 
not call that a ceremony. T know you can 
make a rite or ceremony out of anything; you 
can make a rite or ceremony out of your prayer. 
A man may write his prayers down and say them, 
or he may put a string of beads on his neck and 
go through the ceremony of prayer, and slide a 
bead every time; and it is a rite, a pure cere- 
mony, and nothing else. But that is not Chris- 
tianity; it is not any part of Christianity, nor is 
it in harmony with the letter or spirit of Chris- 
tianity. So, you can make a rite of baptism; 
you can administer it as any other talisman or 
fetich — go through the form and call it religion, 
without any thought in it or any meaning in it, 
or any connection with the inner life of the man 
to whom you administer the rite. I am not 
doing injustice, I think, to anyone, because in 
the religious literature of Christianity, in all 
churches it is called a rite. You will find the 
best writers on this question in every church 
when speaking of baptism calling it a Christian 
rite, and very often, in controversy on one side 
of it, they say it is a mere ceremony, a mere 
rite. 

To me there is no "mere" anything in the 
religion of Jesus Christ. It is an act of faith 
that springs out of the human heart, an intelli- 



336 The Witness of Jesus 

gent conception of the soul that a man does be- 
cause he believes; it is not a rite. You have to 
go back to the childhood of the human race to 
find the origin of all rites, when the people did 
not know what to do, and yet felt they ought to 
do something, and did what they thought had 
to be done. The whole world, in its earlier 
periods, was full of rites. All religions in their 
childhood, in the days of their ignorance and 
superstition, were a mass of rites and ceremonies. 
But when the great Teacher came from heaven 
He gave men a religion of principles, a religion 
of faith, instead of a religion that was full of 
rites and ceremonies. The thing that demon- 
strates him to me as a divine Teacher is that 
fact — the absolute stripping off of all rites and 
ceremonies from religion. 

Now, then, what of the nature of this thing 
we call baptism? I want to talk a little about 
its meaning, if it has any significance at all. 
And if it does not have any meaning, I do not 
want it; if it does not mean something to me 
when it is done, whether I do it or it is done to 
me, I do not want it. I know it is not within 
the sphere of Christianity at all unless it has 
some meaning. And the only way to settle this 
question that I know of is to go to these epistles 
that were written by inspired apostles to guide 
the people, and if these apostles knew the 
meaning of it, we shall find it. I have read to 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 337 

you one of these; I have said to you, over and 

over again, that not a word in the whole New 

Testament was ever written to show anybody 

how to be baptized. These letters were all 

written to people who had been baptized. It 

was unnecessary to explain how that was done, 

when they had already been through it. These 

writers never explained the manner, they simply 

alluded to it, and all we have are the allusions. 

I would like to keep the motive before your 

mind; what does it mean? What did it mean 

to these Christians of Rome? Here is an apostle 

who knew all about the church, and how it was 

built up and organized; and he writes them a 

letter. The letter was the best of his thought. 

In this letter he refers to their baptism. What, 

in his estimation, did that baptism mean to 

them? The apostle, in nearly all of his letters, 

refers the brethren to the time of their baptism, 

in order that they may keep some of its religious 

meaning. Just analyze this little passage here, 

and you will see the apostle says, after referring 

to sin and its effect on the thought and life of 

the world: When it reigned, man was free from 

righteousness and alive to sin; then he said: 

the gospel came, Christ was preached to you, 

the soul took in Christ by faith, and a change 

was made. You can see now what sin was, 

how hateful it was, and how ruinous. By faith 

you are now looking at Christ, and you are dead 
22 



338 The Witness of Jesus 

to sin. That is why the apostle is looking at 
it; that is why he talks about it everywhere. 
That means you ceased to love sin, and you 
wanted to get away from it unto a different life. 
Now, he says, asking the brothers in regard to 
their religious life, "How can we, who are dead 
to sin, live any longer in it?" And then, as a 
proof of their death, and to revive their mem- 
ory, he said: "Don't you know that so many of 
us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were bap- 
tized into his death?" 

There is a great deal in that, more than I can 
bring out in a sermon — that view that you have 
of the death of Christ by faith. The cause of 
death to sin in you is what he is talking about. 
He says, Kven the very act of baptism signifies 
that change in your lives which faith has pro- 
duced, and which I call having died to sin; and 
this act means that , means that you died to sin 
and have been brought into the relationship to 
the Christ of which I told you last Sunday. 
Don't you know you are brought into just that 
relationship to his death? ' 'Wherefore we were 
buried with him by baptism into death" — not 
his death, this time, but the sinner's, carrying 
out the metaphor. When people die they are 
buried, they are put away in the state where 
dead people are put; and when you die to sin, 
you are buried, metaphorically; that is, you 
are put in the state that dead people are in; 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 339 

and now it brings up again your relationship to 
Christ; as he says, "So you also were raised 
with him." He carries the whole figure 
through — not merely the external thing, but 
what this meant to their faith, to their sense of 
sin, to their life in Christ, to the movement of 
the soul that is set in new relation to the old 
sin. Man is brought into relationship with 
Christ; the old forms are then put away, and 
the new man rises, like Christ rose. That is 
what it meant to Paul, and now he says, 
"Brothers, how can you live in sin any longer? 
you are dead to it." And then he brings this 
figure: "For if we have been planted together 
in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in 
that of his resurrection," using a metaphor 
again that everybody in the world can under- 
stand. The seed in the ground, the grain of 
corn, wheat or any form of it, goes to nothing, 
but the life that was in it springs up and you 
see the new and beautiful life on the other side. 
That is Paul's thought; and over there was that 
old life that has perished and gone; over here, 
this new life. And now the apostle is asking 
the meaning of that baptism. He is saying to 
these Christian men and women, "Your baptism 
means something to you. You recall, in your 
thought and heart, the processes you were led 
through, and think of what you were in that 
old life, and of what you are in this new life. 



34-0 The Witness of Jesus 

It will be a stimulant from God, in a strength 
like that of Christ, never to die again. He dies 
no more." 

This is what baptism meant to the Romans. 
Now let us go to the Corinthians, and see what 
it meant to them. He brings it up in writing 
to them; and we have here a little trouble in 
regard to the punctuation of a very obscure 
text. In the fifteenth chapter of I. Corinthians, 
in that vast argument on the resurrection which 
is used in the burial services of all the churches, 
he says: "If Christ be preached, that he rose 
from the dead, how say some among you there 
is no resurrection?" That, by all the com- 
mentators, is called the great argument — the 
argumentum ad absurdum ; the argument that, 
having your premises and working out your 
proposition, you end in absurdity. We all rea- 
son that way. There are those among you who 
take the ground that there is no such thing as 
resurrection. We have men now, and I am one 
of them, that do not believe in a physical, ma- 
terial resurrection; but there were those who did 
not believe in any resurrection at all, of any 
kind, corporeal or spiritual; and now he says, 
How can ye say there is no resurrection? If 
Christ be preached at all he must be preached 
as having risen from the dead. If there is no 
resurrection, Christ was not raised; and if Christ 
was not raised, what is going to be done to 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 341 

those that believe it, and especially those that 
preach it, who have suffered so much for it; and 
then he puts in the paraphrase, What shall ye 
do who are baptized for the dead if there be no 
resurrection? 

We have never heard of one being baptized 
for the dead; there was no such thing done in 
the days of the apostles. Commentators have 
created that condition in order to explain a 
difficulty, as they so often do. The Mormon 
brethren up here do it. If they have lost a 
friend who never joined the church, and they 
want him to be saved, they get some Christian 
and have him baptized for that man. It was 
not done, however, among the early Christians, 
and there is no record of such a case then. 
But, as we know, there was no punctuation in 
the Greek, and the passage has not been punc- 
tuated right. Paul says, carrying on this argu- 
ment of reductio ad absurdum, for if the dead 
rise not, if this thing to some people is the 
grave of the body, and the soul and spirit, then 
all are gone to dust. If there is no resurrec- 
tion, your preaching, believing, suffering and 
your baptism is but outward; the whole thing 
is dead, if the dead rise not. Then he asks the 
question, "Why, then, were you baptized?" 
Not "baptized for the dead"; why was man 
baptized, if it all ends in dust, if there is no 
resurrection and no future? And the apostle 



342 The Witness of Jesus 

simply goes on that hypothesis. If there is no 
resurrection, it is all huper toon nekroon (for 
the dead) to you, and the greatest reductio ad 
absurdum that ever was made. What did bap- 
tism mean to these people? When we look at 
it we will see, everybody will see, it meant their 
faith in the death, the burial and resurrection of 
Jesus Christ. It meant some act of theirs that 
had some reference to the resurrection of the 
Son of God. They so say it, and out of their 
hearts hope and believe, not only in the resur- 
rection of Christ, but through that, in the res- 
urrection of all the dead. He says that to the 
Corinthians, or he did not mean anything. I 
am speaking now of its religious meaning, that 
has been placed and fixed here in the genuine 
writing of an apostle who was the instrument 
by which it was done, and he knew how to ex- 
plain it. Your baptism, he says, means the 
whole conception that you have of the death, 
burial and resurrection of Christ, and your faith 
in it, and your own hope in your heart of the 
resurrection of the dead. It meant that to the 
Corinthians. 

I have just one more reference. There are 
three or four more, but I have time to take but 
one. In the Galatian letter — and these epistles 
are the strongest things we can get in regard to 
its meaning — he said: We are all children by 
faith now in Christ Jesus. He was meaning 






Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 343 

that trust that I spoke of at the beginning of 
my remarks. I learned it from Paul. Under 
the old dispensation he said it was all law, but 
now we have become children of God by faith; 
u for as many of you as have been baptized into 
Jesus Christ have put on Christ"; now, he says, 
"there is no more Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, 
male nor female, because we have all become 
one in Christ; we have been adopted and be- 
come one vast family, wherever we are, who- 
ever we are, on this earth. The commentators 
tell us, that "probably" — that is about as near 
as they get to anything — it refers to the fact 
that they think of religion as having a new 
suit of clothes; as typical of the new man he 
was about to be. Putting on a life, putting on 
a person, taking on a new spirit, a new char- 
acter, and explaining that to them as by putting 
on a new suit of clothes! Those are rites with 
a vengeance. Putting on a person is one thing, 
and putting on clothes is another. How would 
you put on a person, a life? The language 
comes to us from the great organ of civilization 
in those days. The university of all antiquity 
was the theatre. People who wanted to learn 
history, literature' or poetry went to the theatre. 
The educating power of the Greeks and Romans 
was the theatre, and Paul frequently refers to it, 
and here we have a reference to it. An actor is 
one who puts on somebody else. I am not very 



344 The Witness of Jesus 

familiar with this; I usually take names I have 
heard. I believe Richard III. was the great 
character of Forrest in his day; and you take 
Forrest, giving the play of Richard III., what 
does he do? That is what he means. It is not 
a mere matter of clothes; that is the very least 
thing. He would not put on Richard till he 
knows all about him; he is to make his mind 
absolutely familiar with the details of the his- 
tory of the old king or he cannot put him on at 
all. He is to bring his spirit into actual con- 
tact with that spirit and feel like it; in other 
words he is to learn how to think like him, to 
feel like him, or he never can put him on. 
You, who have been in the habit of going to 
these places with your criticism, criticise one 
who does not put on his character, saying he is 
not familiar enough with his thought, his way 
of speaking, his feeling. Let the mind be 
brought into contact with the other mind so he 
feels like it; then we will get some clothes to 
look like him as much as possible. And the 
curtain rises, and what is it he is going to re- 
enact? the life of Richard. Now that is what 
we have here. The mind of the believer is 
brought in contact with the mind of Christ; 
the great truth in the mind, heart and life of 
Jesus has been brought into contact with his 
mind, and the spirit of God in Christ has 
brought that inner life in contact with his. 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 345 

That is the reason he died to sin, and if he 
knows the heart and the mind of Christ he is 
like Christ; the curtain rises, and you stand 
there to re-enact the life of Jesus Christ. That 
is what it means. It is a beautiful thought; 
and Paul says the act of baptism was the lifting 
of the curtain. It stands for just exactly what 
the rising of the curtain means. You stand 
there now; you are going to leave your old life; 
that has gone; you are going out on the great 
theatre of this world, among its men and 
women, its nations; and from this time on, you 
are going to re-enact the life of Jesus Christ of 
Nazareth; and when the man is baptized the 
curtain has risen, and he stands there before the 
world to re-enact the life of Jesus. 

Baptism meant that to the Galatians. Does 
it mean anything? It is a pledge that a man 
is under, in the presence of the universe; that 
the old life has been left and the new life has 
been embraced; and he has said to the world, 
"I am a Christian; I am going to live the life 
of Christ.'' 

Now, I have just got this third argument in 
regard to the form. Just ask yourselves a ques- 
tion. This is better than all the dictionaries in 
the world. You need not get what Calvin says, 
what Luther or Wesley says, what Campbell 
says. . The Greek word is all right. I have no 
objection to that, but you do not need it. Just 



346 The Witness of Jesus 

ask yourselves, what act is possible to a man 
that means to express all this? and you will 
settle the mode. I do not mean one of them, 
but what act is there possible, to a man, which, 
when you see it, means a man's faith in Christ; 
in his death, burial and resurrection? That 
means not only the faith, but the hope in your 
heart, that all the dead will rise? That means, 
when you see it, when you see a man pass 
through this mode, that he is dead to himself, 
to everything; that he is in a new life, the life 
of Christ? How, I would like to know, does 
some act in the liquid or solid of this universe 
express it? That is really my opinion about it; 
it is not an opinion, it is faith; there is but one 
possible thought as to its meaning. 

You will indulge me. I know there are good 
people in the world that believe in all this, that 
every man must be baptized in the way he thinks 
right, to be honest. I think I have enough of 
that spirit to think no evil, when people differ 
with me. But to me there is but one act, and 
that act is a burial, and a rising again; that is 
all. To me this act of faith is to show what is 
the thought in the mind, the thing that is be- 
lieved in the heart. He wants to act that; he 
wants to show it; how can he do it? And that 
is the reason it was put there just where it is. 
It is the main object in the mind, and means 
the burial and rising again. 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 347 

I know it is said that just the application of 
water means what the Spirit does inside; but 
that conception is very coarse. Just how the 
Spirit cleanses a man inside, by putting water 
on the outside, is more than I know. I don't 
know how the Spirit acts; I know it makes me 
think something, and I know it kindles my 
mental feelings and sensibilities; that is all I 
know; but when you come to the origin of its 
methods of action, you are out of my reach. I 
know the great argument, but that does not 
amount to anything to me, though it may to 
other people; that argument in the beginning 
of Acts: He poured out his Spirit on the people, 
and that is called baptism, and therefore we get 
pouring. That the Holy Ghost is gas or liquid, 
in the sense that it is poured out, and that in 
baptizing a man I do something just like that; 
I would not use such an argument. My con- 
ception of God and of the Spirit of God is so 
different; I could not use that. And it is a 
marvel to me that good men let themselves, 
simply through mere party feeling, talk about 
the infinite God, and the Spirit of God, in that 
way; they must do it simply to carry out their 
purpose. 

You can see from what I have said that 
baptism administered to somebody that knows 
nothing about it, is nothing. It is a rite, a 
ceremony, that is all; and that is all it is 



348 The Witness of Jesus 

claimed to be. You administer it to a little 
child, and you have performed a rite, and that 
act is in the nature of a talisman, or fetich, and 
nothing else; it is not better than any other 
fetich, except the motive you have. I am keep- 
ing in mind, now, the good and intelligent peo- 
ple that are going to do it, long after I am 
dead. That does not change the nature of it at 
all. There is no relation in the world between 
saying some words over an infant, and putting 
some water on its shin, and its thought, feeling 
and action; and you know, and every rational 
man in this world knows, that religion is what 
a man thinks; it is what a man feels; it is what 
a man does; it is not a something done to him. 
Your religion is your thought, your feeling, 
your life; that thought and feeling will lead you 
to live right. You perform a little act like that 
upon an infant, and say that twenty years from 
now, when he comes to think, this some- 
thing on his skin and saying these words is 
going to have something to do with his religion. 
We know, when we come to think, it would do 
no such thing; there is not a particle of religion 
to it. It is just like an old friend of mine who 
used to live here. I once had dyspepsia very 
badly, and he said to me, "You keep a peach 
seed in your pocket, and you will never have 
dyspepsia; I have a peach seed in my pocket 
that I have carried for years, and I have never 



Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 349 

had dyspepsia." I know enough about physi- 
ology and therapeutics to know that a peach 
seed carried in a man's pocket is not going to 
help a man's digestion or rectify the condition 
of his stomach. I know this, too, that the 
peach seed has just as much to do with the con- 
dition of the stomach and digestion as the water 
on the baby has to do with its religion. There 
is no relation at all between the one and the 
other, and, as a matter of fact, the figures show 
that these causes of religion make nobody re- 
ligious. Among those to whom this rite has 
been administered in infancy there ought to be 
a very much larger proportion of Christians at 
thirty years of age than of those to whom it 
has not been administered; but I am willing to 
go to any community where Baptists and Dis- 
ciples have churches and take the people of 
thirty years of age, and there will be just as 
large a proportion of them Christians as among 
those baptized in infancy. This would not be 
the case if baptizing them in infancy would 
make them religious. If putting water on a 
child has anything to do with anything re- 
ligious, then in the penal institutions there 
ought to be a smaller number baptized in in- 
fancy than of those that were not; and there 
would be; but if you will take the statistics you 
will find a great number of those people that 
we have in penitentiaries and jails were bap- 



350 The Witness of Jesus 

tized in infancy; that would not be the case if 
it had anything to do with religion; this is sim- 
ply a matter of fact. I am talking about the 
meaning of it, brethren. I am not talking 
about the intentions of those who love it. I 
know it has one feature, and that is the reason 
why it started; it is not that now. It is a fact 
that every man would have his children, when 
they grow up, to be members of his church in 
these ages of controversy; and if you give that 
thought to the child he will be apt to feel that 
if he joins any church he will attend that. 

I have kept you too long, but I want to turn 
your thought once more to the meaning of this 
great and to me religious thing that we call 
baptism: an ordinance — not a rite, nor a cere- 
mony, nor a statute, nor a positive law; a great 
act of faith. I want to turn your thought into 
your own heart to-day, and to go back and look 
at it. You did not know very much when you 
were baptized if you were like I was. I was 
baptized when very young, and I have grown in 
it since. It was my faith in the Christ; it was 
my faith in the word of God, and I look at that 
act of mine as the faith's great objective. It 
was faith on the inside gone out so that every- 
body could see it; it is simply the expression of 
the faith of the human heart in a living, divine 
act. If it is not that it is nothing. And the 
time will come, in my opinion — I am that much 






Christian Baptism — Its Meaning 351 

of a prophet — unless the education of the world 
change, unless men shall cease to be educated 
as they are being educated now in the public 
schools; unless we lose sight of the great order 
physical and moral in the universe, unless we 
lose sight of the law of cause and effect that 
runs through it all, if we go on taking people 
as they are, the time will come when the great 
controversy will be, whether a man should be 
immersed on the ground of his faith in Christ 
or not baptized at all. That is going to be the 
next question-, I have no doubt of that; it is 
that or nothing. To a man to whom comes 
now the order of God, the word, having that 
text in it, who goes to the Bible and reads it, 
it is that or nothing. That is going to be the 
next great question, and it is beginning to show 
itself now. I believe myself men need an out- 
ward act — an act to which they can always look 
back. Paul referred these men to their history. 
He turned them back in their experience; in it 
he finds the hope they have in the future, the 
faith they have in the Christ, and in the divine 
life. 

He finds in it the pledge the soul has made, 
to walk beneath the sun and the stars of the 
universe, re-enacting the life of Jesus. To me 
it has a sublime side, an impressive meaning — 
a mental, moral, and religious meaning. I 
want to look back to it, as the day when my 



352 The Witness of Jesus 

faith came out of me; when I began to live that 
life; when I started to be a new man. And I 
think, when I get on the other side, when I 
form an estimate of the life I have lived in this 
world, I want to remember a starting point, 
when I look back to this beginning, and re- 
member that Paul said: "God be thanked, that 
though you were the slave of sin once you 
obeyed from the heart that form of teaching 
into which you were delivered, you are made 
free from sin and have become servants of right- 
eousness. Therefore you have entrance into 
holiness and everlasting life." May God bring 
us all to this glorious end at last! 






XIX 

GROUND OF FAITH IN A 
FUTURE LIFE 

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, 
nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other 
creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, 
which is in Christ Jesus, our I^ord. — Rom. 8;j8,jp. 

The subject on which I wish to speak this 
morning is the grounds on which we believe in 
the future life. The affirmation that has in it the 
strongest proof of any that I know of in the 
New Testament is the statement that closes the 
eighth chapter of Romans, which I have read to 
you many a time. "For I am persuaded that 
neither death nor life, nor angels, nor princi- 
palities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any 
other creature shall be able to separate us from 
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
Iyord." This passage is familiar to us, and 
very precious to us. My object is to present as 
candidly as I can the ground on which we be- 
lieve in an eternal life, a life beyond this, or 
immortality. One of the oldest beliefs which 
we have any knowledge of in the world is this 
belief of a life beyond this. The oldest re- 
ligions have some kind of a belief in this, as 
23 353 



354 The Witness of Jesus 

far as the earliest records go that have been left 
us. We learn from the monuments of Egypt, 
these old hieroglyphics, of man living a life on 
the other side. This confidence has not been 
as intense in some places and among some peo- 
ples as it has been among others. Perhaps it is 
true to say that we have in the world no people 
that have arrived at a sufficient degree of culture 
to think and to place their thoughts on record, 
and whose records have come down to us in any 
form, who have not had among them some in- 
timation and belief in a life beyond this. It is 
fair to say that among the civilized peoples of 
the world, from the beginning until now, and 
now perhaps more than at any other time, there 
have been those who did not entertain that 
belief. There have been those who believed in 
the life or some life beyond this; there have 
been others who did not; and this would seem 
to indicate that there have always been before 
the thoughts and the minds of men, as they ob- 
served everything about them, evidences both 
ways. This has plainly been the case. Because 
men have loved life, and give it up so reluc- 
tantly, they have been exceedingly anxious to 
believe in the life eternal; but they have never 
been able to prove it to their satisfaction. It 
cannot be demonstrated as a proposition in 
geometry, or as we can prove the well-known 
facts of science, and it stands that way before 



Ground of Faith 355 

our minds. It is a thing which the heart be- 
lieves, and yet we feel all the time that we have 
no absolute proof. 

Now it will do us good to sometimes look at 
the grounds on which that belief stands. Men 
have freighted that belief with theologies. We 
know certain things because we have proved 
them so often in nature. We have, sometimes, 
beautiful things: the oldest literature and the 
classical literatures of the world contain the 
outbursts of life in the springtime, telling us, 
pointing out, giving intimations, hopes, dreams; 
we have light at the dawn of day. And when 
men look at the other side of nature, the evi- 
dence is just as strong the other way. And so 
men have looked at both sides, and, with the 
heart breaking, have asked this question: "If 
a man die, shall he live again?" 

I referred in one of my discourses to the 
argument that comes to us from scientific inves- 
tigation, an argument, as I said to you then, 
that does not demonstrate it, but to me it makes 
the opposite belief absurd. I remember when 
we were talking about the great invisible forces 
of nature, stated by all the scientists of the 
world to be eternal, and the force that is in man 
having absolute control of them, using them 
day by day, it would be very absurd to suppose 
the greatest of these is temporal and transient, 
and that those things which it is controlling day 



356 The Witness of Jesus 

by day are eternal; it would make trie belief 
absurd on that side. But it does not demon- 
strate it. There may be some condition of 
things that we do not know, and leave still 
some ground to wish we had a clearer demon- 
stration. Now, not to look over this argument 
from science, there are a number of evidences. 
The argument from correlation has been pre- 
sented in modern times as a probability, but not 
a demonstration. Darwin shows, and other 
writers have followed him, that so far as the 
beginnings found in the world are concerned in 
correlated things, everything is correlated to 
something else. The eye to the sun, the ear 
to the atmosphere, the hand to the objects we 
use, and the foot to the ground we walk on; the 
bird has its bill, just deep enough; the flower 
just deep enough for the bee to extract the 
honey from the bottom, and all things in the 
world are arranged that way. Now the sub- 
limest fact in the history of the human race is 
this conviction, this belief in another life, and 
if there is no other life, then we are told there 
is just simply one uncorrelated thing we know 
of in the world; and that is absurd. Some of 
the best scientists, the brightest and deepest 
among our thinkers, look at it in that way. If 
it be that there is no life beyond this, it is the 
one uncorrelated thing; we have here the great 



Ground of Faith 357 

object of the human soul, with nothing to cor- 
respond with it. 

But this, to me, is not the strongest ground. 
There are two other things that make it possi- 
ble for us to believe in a future life. One of 
them is the personality of the spirit: the sepa- 
rate existence from matter; the difference be- 
tween matter and spirit. If that be true, then 
we have every ground to believe that matter 
dies and spirit lives. If materialism in any 
form is true, we have no ground at all % for a 
future life, but if spirit is not matter, and 
matter is not spirit, then it is probable that one 
of these may exist without the other, and when 
the other passes away. This is one of the 
grounds on which we believe in the future life; 
we believe in the existence of spirit, pure spirit 
life. Now I have no time to argue, and give 
you the reasons for that; though I do think I 
have reasons satisfactory that can demonstrate 
it. The trouble is, we do not know how spirit 
exists. I know that men assume to know all 
about it, but they do not. We know how ma- 
terial things exist. We know that we think, 
we believe and we reason, we hope and we fear, 
and we have not found matter thinking or rea- 
soning; it takes something else to think and 
reason, which is not matter. That is one of 
our deductions; we have not time to follow it. 

The other and last one is an absolutely nee- 



358 The Witness of Jesus 

essary ground for anything like a rational and 
strong belief in a future life; that is, what we 
call optimism in our time. If God is managing 
the universe, both sides of it, good and evil, 
pain and pleasure, light and darkness, life and 
death; if he is God, He will make it all work 
together for good; the outcome will be good. 
If He exists and is not God, it may end in evil; 
or if, as is said by Mr. Ingersoll and men of that 
class, there is no great central consciousness in 
this universe, or if there is we cannot prove 
there is — then I am left forever in doubt about 
it. I must believe in God. I must believe that 
He is an infinite personality. I must believe 
that He thinks, that He reasons, as I think and 
reason, and will and know. I must believe that 
He is infinitely good, and there is an end, a far- 
off end, to which all things are tending, and that 
is good, and not evil. I have to believe in good, 
on the other side, or I have no ground of belief 
at all. 

But now the point to which I wish to call 
your attention as Christian people is one we 
have had before you often, and we will have 
before you often again, probably, as we shall 
have the same experience in the future we have 
had in the past. We shall have occasion to 
bring before your mind the grounds on which 
hearts can be held up and not break and go into 
desolation — the ground which, I believe, lies 



Ground of Faith 359 

along the direction of this last thought, but a 
little further. If God is good, and He loves His 
children, this is to me the strongest and deepest 
ground that I know for hope in the life beyond. 
If God is my Father; if I have been created by 
Him; if I have a spirit life; if He means the 
good of the universe, and if He loves his chil- 
dren, then I have the strongest ground that I 
know of, in the Bible or out of it. As I have 
stated to you so often, my belief, my confidence, 
in living again, is simply in the love of God. 
If there is any way of proving to me that vast, 
infinite fact that God loves me, loves man, 
when you prove that fact you have proved to 
me that I shall not die; I shall live and con- 
tinue to live. This is my confidence. I used 
to wonder, a good while ago, why it was that 
in the religion of the Old Testament there is so 
little about a future life; there is absolutely 
nothing in it about the life in the future, until 
after the captivity. If you arrange these books 
chronologically in the Old Testament, you will 
not find a single clear statement concerning a 
future life. When you get down to the cap- 
tivity we begin to have some intimation, but it 
is very meagre. The kind of future life that 
the Jews conceived of, even then, if you had it 
before your mind, you would not want. The 
conceptions of the Greeks and the Jews, we are 
taught, had some opposition to mattei; they 



360 The Witness of Jesus 

had an idea of the life beyond, but it was a pale, 
shadowy life in a nether world. Their idea of 
the universe was different from ours; the world 
to thern had three departments. Therefore they 
could not have any better idea, because there 
was no better to have at that time. They had 
the idea that heaven had three departments — 
the air, our atmosphere, and then the cloud 
region to the stars, and then beyond the stars 
where God was supposed to dwell; and the 
nether world was down below us. We believe 
still that way because we have been trained so. 
We always talk about hell as being down; we 
talk about heaven as being up; it is a survival 
of ancient thought. It will not be outgrown 
for a long time. If we stop and think, there is 
no down nor up; in twenty-four hours your eyes 
sweep around the whole sky and the firmament; 
you know that people are standing on the earth 
exactly on the opposite side of it; and they 
have the same feeling about the positions of 
these places that you have; and when we get on 
the other side, as we will be in twelve hours 
from now, we will still think that we are up 
and that people down below us are down. It is 
purely a form of thought. The idea was prev- 
alent up to the time of Dante and Milton, that 
somewhere, down in the earth, there was a vast 
region, called hades, that had two departments; 
the Greeks had it divided into Elvsian fields 



Ground of Faith 361 

and Tartarus; the Jews had Gehenna, and they 
also had a Tartarus; Peter used that word and 
paradise; and one was a bad place and the other 
was a good one; that was the conception they 
had; they never had one better than that, be- 
cause they had no adequate idea of the physical 
universe. They had not these vast and glori- 
ous revelations, for that is what they are, when 
God revealed Himself, almost in a generation, 
as He never revealed Himself to any other gen- 
eration, so far as the universe is concerned, and 
told us what it was and how it was arranged. 
We have not had time to get away from the old 
thought. The Jewish idea was that we went 
out into that region, and it was a life of shame. 
They thought that a man was something like 
an angel, a material being, but the matter of 
the body was invisible; and in that condition it 
was a life of shame. And when I came to read 
the Old Testament and got hold of this idea, I 
found it has given us to-day the only ground we 
have for it. 

Now there is no religion, no form of thought, 
that can have any strong belief in future life 
until love is its predominant feature. In the 
Old Testament, all through, it is law, justice 
and holiness. You give us a God of infinite 
power, infinite majesty, infinite justice and in- 
finite holiness; you make these the absorbing 
attributes of His character; and you have 



362 The Witness of Jesus 

nothing to do with a future life; you do not 
know what He will do with you. I am unjust 
and sinful, and I don't know what may become 
of me. We have to come to the New Testament 
before the great rational evidence comes up, and 
the reason of it is this: there is what the world 
could not know before, that "God so loved the 
world." There are some theologies that do not 
believe that He loves it now. How many ages, 
both among pagans, Jews and Christians, have 
we been taught that the very nature of the 
world is sinful, and God hates sin! How many 
ages have we been taught that an infant is full of 
sin as soon as it breathes the atmosphere; that its 
very body and soul are sinful! How could there 
be any belief in love when you believe that? 
Men can be religious; can be strict in their 
lives; can be extremely just and self-denying 
with that faith, but not loving; and when love 
is gone, then life is gone, because life is love, if 
we are in the universe of God. If you have the 
Old Testament you have read in the five books 
of Moses the laws given to this people; but 
there is not a word about love; they are to do 
this, that and the other, and not to do this, that 
and the other, and God will bless them in their 
homes, in their fields, their country and in their 
nation; but there is nothing at all about a life 
beyond this. And the reason why it could not 
be there is that there was no love there; it is 



Ground of Faith 363 

the law of the Lord, and there is no place for 
it. But when it came to be said, "God is 
love"; that He loves His children with an in- 
finite and everlasting love, then we begin to 
have a look beyond this life. Justice will sim- 
ply reward and punish; holiness will just simply 
burn up all uncleanness; power will execute 
these two things; but what will love do? What 
does it do, as we know, in the universe of God? 
Now this is a simple question we have put be- 
fore you many a time. We have it in all 
phases of life: what is love doing? what is it 
for? what are its functions? what is its reason? 
what its activity in the universe? what is love 
and what is it doing? It is simply living; it is 
perpetuating and giving life. You cannot 
think now of any life at all without thinking 
of love as that which lies at the root of it. I 
am not able to conceive of life, of its begin- 
ning, without there being love behind its begin- 
ning in anything that lives. Through the 
whole of this universe about us, whether it be 
in the vegetable world or in the animal world 
or in the human world, love is below every- 
thing that lives; that is what is doing it. We 
learn something of its nature by studying it; 
we want generalization here and we want in- 
duction here, just as we do anywhere else. 
When we have that side of nature that we call 
the loving side, what is it? We are waiting 



364 The Witness of Jesus 

for it now; we have the other side. We have 
the side of nature where the sun has gone away; 
and everything is dead: the whole of the world 
around us, the vegetable world, the plants are 
all dead; but when we get back to the sunlight 
we get warmth and birth in a rudimentary way. 
It is love — God's love, coming through nature 
and enfolding the earth; life begins to spring 
up; that is what love does. In another month 
and a half the atmosphere breathes, the sun 
shines out, you go out and look around you, 
nature is singing and life is responding. It is 
love that is starting that life; it is being born 
in the womb of infinite love. And we say that 
is what love is. It is so in regard to all animal 
life everywhere. I am not going into details; 
your own ideas and imagination can show you 
that when the birds come in the spring, just 
like human beings, they have their little love- 
making time, become attached; then they build 
a nest and then after a little while young birds 
are born out of that love; and that is the way 
all animal life comes; there is never any animal 
life any other way. It is God's law; it is God 
Himself in nature. The function and activity 
of love in the universe is to give life; it is not 
simply to impart life; its nature is to perpetu- 
ate. Now, if you see families struggling as you 
do every day, what are they doing? What is 
the toil of the father and of the mother, the 



Ground of Faith 365 

self-sacrifice and all that; what is it? It is 
to perpetuate somebody's life; it is love trying 
to enable somebody to live. There are children 
at home, and the parents want them to live and 
not starve. All the activities that you study 
among the rich and among the poor in the 
efforts of humanity all over the world are simply 
love striving to perpetuate life; that is what it 
is for; you want these beings to live. I am 
looking at the nature of what we call love; and 
that is the reason that its nature is the strongest 
antagonist of death. L,ove hates death; I have 
had to say to you many a time that love never 
allows anything to die it is attached to, no 
matter what it is. If you love anything, and 
it dies it pains you, and as long as you can pre- 
vent its death, you will. The little plant you 
have in your window to-day, if you love it, you 
water it, evening and morning, and keep it 
alive. How much more these little human 
plants that are about you! You would not let 
one of them die if you were to live a thousand 
years. No one would let a child die if he could 
help it. Love is life ; to hate is death. 

No man who loves his wife would let her die 
if he lived a thousand years; he says that in 
every act. I would not let anything die that I 
loved, nor you, nor anybody else; that is the 
nature of love. Now this life convinces me 
that that love is infinite; convinces me that 



366 The Witness of Jesus 

that love has omnipotence behind it; that that 
love does not want me, any more than I want 
my child, to die. As the father pitieth his 
children, so the Lord feels toward those that 
love Him, and I cannot let my child die, if I 
can help it. 

The love of God is omnipotent. It can pre- 
vent death. That is my ground; I am trusting 
God's love in the life to come. I have no fears 
in the world of dying as long as I believe in 
that; no more than a child has of going to sleep 
at night, when his mother's face is over him, 
beaming and smiling. He feels perfectly sure 
he will be awakened in the morning. I am 
willing to go to sleep, because it is impossible, 
as long as that love remains, to let me die. 
God's love will have to turn into something 
else, if it fastens on me and grasps me, if I die 
at all. Nothing in God's life can let me die. 
This is a matter of confidence. The great ne- 
cessity, then, is for me to believe in God's word. 
How does it come to me? I mean to look at 
this thing very carefully and calmly to see the 
basis on which humanity believes, not myself, 
but everybody. If they cannot see it, they have 
not studied it; I cannot get it from another. 

And so, this is the bed-rock of our faith in 
the future life, the love of God for us, as shown 
in the life and teaching and death of Jesus 
Christ. Jesus lived a life of love all through. 



Ground of Faith 367 

In one of his prayers I read in the opening 
service, He is pleading with the infinite Father: 
that these disciples may know "that thou lovest 
them as thou hast loved me." He wanted the 
world to know that God loves them; and He 
wanted to show it to them in his life. Thus I 
am indebted to Christ: I am indebted to the re- 
ligion of Christ; I am indebted to what He 
taught me of the heavenly Father; to what He 
has shown me in Himself and my relation to 
the great character of God, for the knowledge 
that God loves me. The first time it was ever 
written, the first time it was ever thought, was 
when Christ was gone, when men began to 
think; they looked this way, and said, "God is 
love," for neither Greek nor Jew nor prophet 
nor anybody else in the universe ever read that 
sentence until after He was gone; it was not in 
the world, in the mind, the heart or the tongue 
of human nature until they had seen Him, and 
somehow or other there was left that impression 
on the world. Thus the resurrection of Christ 
proves the future life. The first sermon I heard 
on this question was to show that the life of 
Jesus was the life of the Father; and that did 
not prove it to me by itself; it did not prove it 
like you can prove a proposition in geometry; 
that Jesus Christ rose from the dead literally; it 
would simply prove that he rose from the dead: 
it would not prove that we would rise from the 



368 The Witness of Jesus 

dead. If you prove that Enoch was translated 
it just proves that he was translated; it does not 
prove that I will be translated; a single fact in 
the universe does not prove other facts; we have 
to learn to reason better than that now. But 
put love under it, and then it means something. 
The resurrection of Christ derives its signifi- 
cance from the great fact that he rose from 
the dead as a child of the infinite Father. Be- 
cause the Father loved him he would not let 
him die. He said, "I am not afraid; my Father 
loves me. Men may nail me to the cross, and 
the life of this body will go out, but my Father 
loves me; I am not afraid of dying at all." 
And he said to these apostles, "You will find 
that out; I am to see you again, and you will 
know it." Then he says, "Because I live, you 
shall live also"; the same ground on which my 
life stood is that on which your life stands, and 
my Father loves you, just as he does me." 

Then the resurrection of Christ means some- 
thing. That same power that raised Him up 
will raise me up, and I can believe in the life 
to come, because I believe in God's love; and 
that is the reason why I think the apostle 
argued that out. 

If God who loves us that way is for us, who 
can be against us? And how do I know He 
loves us? He who took his only Son and freely 



Ground of Faith 369 

delivered him up for us, will also freely give us 

everything else. 

"I am persuaded," the apostle affirms with 

much intensity, "that neither death, nor life, 

nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 

height, nor depth," nor any other thing, things 

above or things below, things in the past or 

things in the future, things present and things 

to come, nothing in the world, can separate me 

from the life to come. That grasps me and 

holds me and presents to me the ground on 

which I am trusting. No mechanical ground 

can satisfy me. I am believing a fact — the 

nature of love — the nature of God — the nature 

of souls. I am standing on that ground on 

which the universe itself stands. I believe the 

spirit of man shall live, because God is love. 
24 



A Memorial Address 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

IT has been deemed wise to append to this 
volume of sermons at least a brief biograph- 
ical sketch of their author. It is impossible 
to find room, within the limits of this volume, 
for all the encomiums on our lamented brother, 
called forth by his death. The secular press 
vied with the religious in paying eloquent 
tributes to his character as a man, and to his 
greatness as a Christian thinker and preacher. 
There was that in his unpretentious life, his 
lovable nature, his unselfish service for human- 
ity, which called forth the admiration of all 
classes and conditions of men. The religious 
and the irreligious respected and honored him. 
On the day of his funeral not only the religious 
people of all the churches of his town were 
present at his funeral, and through their repre- 
sentatives paid their tributes of honor to his 
memory, but even the saloon-keepers closed 
the doors of their saloons, and some of them 
followed in the sad procession that marched to 
the cemetery where his body was deposited. 
It was natural that the death of such a man, so 
exalted in the nobility of his character, the 

purity of his life and the powers of his intel- 
373 



Biographical Sketch 

lect, should call forth a large number of loving 
tributes. But out of all these we have selected 
the Memorial Address of T. P. Haley, his life- 
long friend and kinsman, who was appointed 
by his brethren to prepare and deliver such 
address at the State Missionary Convention 
following his decease. This address, when de- 
livered, met with the hearty approval of the 
friends who heard it, as a faithful portrayal of 
the life, character and teaching of the distin- 
guished preacher, some of whose thoughts are 
preserved for us in the preceding sermons. 
Let us hope that some time, when the truths 
and ideas for which he stood shall come into 
more general recognition, some pen, worthy of 
the task, may write the life of this able and 
devoted servant of God and friend of man. 
Until then, this Memorial Address will give 
the general reader the essential facts of his 
life, and his chief characteristics as a man and 
a preacher of Christ. 



A MEMORIAL ADDRESS.* 

BY T. P. HALEY. 

To me lias been assigned the duty of pre- 
senting to you a memorial address on the life 
and labors of our late brother and comrade, 
Alexander Procter. The chief reason for this 
assignment is no doubt the fact that I have 
known the deceased all my life. For about 50 
years our association has been most intimate. 
In fact, we were associated not only as com- 
rades in a common cause, but we were kinsmen 
according to the flesh, and I loved him. 

Alexander Procter was born in Fayette Co., 
Ky., in the year of our Iyord 1825, and departed 
this life at his beautiful home in Independence, 
Mo., on the 23rd day of July, 1900. He was 
therefore 75 years, 3 months and 23 days old. 
He was the second son of Roland T. Procter 
and Dianna Chapman, both of whom were na- 
tives of Kentucky. They came to Missouri in 
the fall of 1836 and settled in Randolph Coun- 
ty, not far from the site of the city in which 
we are now convened. The subject of this 
sketch was then in his 12th year. His educa- 
tion was begun in Kentucky under that famous 

*Delivered before the Missouri Christian Convention at Moberly, 
Mo., October, 1900. 

375 



376 A Memorial Address 

teacher, John Darnaby, whom he always re- 
membered with respect. He grew up on his 
father's farm and was accustomed to all the 
privations and hardships that belonged to pio- 
neer farmer life in Missouri at that early day. 
He labored on the farm and attended the neigh- 
borhood schools a few months in every year. 
He was an intelligent lad, fond of reading, and 
devoured with avidity the few papers and 
books that came in his way. He made rapid 
progress in his studies and was easily first in 
all his classes. He was a robust youth and al- 
ways first in the contests of strength and 
achievement among farmer boys. He was the 
first chosen in every game on the playground. 
He soon came to lead the farm hands at the 
log-rolling, the house-raising or in the harvest 
field. At a very early age he was an officer of 
the militia and drill master on the muster 
grounds. 

Arrived at the age of 18 years he determined 
to seek better school advantages than the new 
settlement afforded, and entered the school at 
Paris, Mo. I regret that I do not now recall 
the name of the teacher. Here also he made 
rapid progress and formed some of the strong- 
est attachments of his life. He numbered 
among the citizens of Paris many of his most 
devoted friends throughout his life, and was ever 



A Memorial Address 377 

not only a welcome visitor but always an hon- 
ored guest. 

Prior to his leaving home a Christian Church 
had been organized in his father's neighbor- 
hood by that eminent preacher, Allen Wright, 
and in his early youth he confessed the Savior 
and was immersed, if I mistake not, by Martin 
Sidenor, one of the early preachers who died 
some years afterward in Monroe Co., Mo. 

If Alexander had thought of becoming a 
preacher of the gospel before he entered the 
academy at Paris I think it was not known; 
but while pursuing his studies he began to 
speak in the social meetings of the church and 
made some reputation as a speaker. His 
brethren hoped that he might hecome a preach- 
er, for he had impressed them with his superior 
intellectual power. 

About this time Alexander Campbell, Presi- 
dent of Bethany College, proposed to the 
churches in Missouri that he would, from the 
proceeds of the sale of the hymn-book which 
he had compiled and which had h*ad an exten- 
sive sale in Missouri, educate one young man 
for the ministry, such young man to be selected 
by a committee whom he would name. The 
committee was composed of Thos. M. Allen, of 
Boone County, Jacob Creath,. of Marion, and 
Henry Thomas, of Monroe. 

Alexander was not a candidate for the ap- 



378 A Memorial Address 

pointment. Indeed it is not certain that he 
knew of Mr. Campbell's proposition, but when 
the committee met in Jefferson City, Mo. , he 
was unanimously chosen. This was in the 
early part of the year 1845. 

He left immediately for Bethany College, 
traveling to St. Louis by stage and thence by 
steamboat down the Mississippi and up the 
Ohio to Wellsburg. 

This was the turning point in his history. 
Once at the feet of Alexander Campbell, with 
his superior abilities, and his thirst for knowl- 
edge, it was no surprise to his friends that he 
completed his preparatory studies aud a full 
four years' college course in a little more than 
three years, graduating with distinction in the 
year 1848. This he did, however, at the ex- 
pense of his health, for he came home pale and 
emaciated and with the seeds of a disease of 
throat and lungs which gave his friends great 
anxiety and made much of his busy life a heavy 
burden, and greatly hindered him in his life 
work. During his college days he preached in 
the churches adjacent, and now and then came 
rumors that he gave promise of becoming a 
great preacher. Mr. Campbell himsetf ex- 
pected great things of him. 

When he returned to Missouri he preached 
his first sermon at Huntsville, only a little way 
from where this city now stands. A large con- 



A Memorial Address 379 

gregation of his old friends and neighbors as- 
sembled to hear him. They were not disap- 
pointed. They were indeed proud of him and 
the success he had achieved. 

He was the first graduate Bethany College 
had given to Missouri, and as far as is known 
to me, the first preacher in the Christian Church 
in Missouri that held a college diploma. 

Shortly after his Huntsville sermon he met, 
probably at Paris, that popular and succcessful 
evangelist, D. Pat Henderson, and was per- 
suaded to accompany him through Missouri 
and Illinois on an evangelizing campaign, but 
he did not find this work congenial and soon 
returned to Missouri. On this journey he made 
his first visit to the church in St. L,ouis. His 
great heart was touched within him when he 
saw the great buildings of the denominations 
there while his brethren were worshiping in a 
small house in an obscure part of the city. On 
his return to the larger churches in the state 
he made eloquent and fervid appeals, in behalf 
of the church there, for means with which to 
construct a commodious and elegant house of 
worship, little dreaming that he would be one 
of the first to occupy its pulpit when completed. 
After holding a number of protracted meetings 
at different points in the state he was called to 
Lexington to succeed the lamented Thomas W. 
Gaines, who had moved to Howard County. 



380 A Memorial Address 

He preached in what was then known as the 
South St. Church, which was an off-shoot of the 
old Main St. Church, the result of an unfortunate 
church difficulty. While he was successful it was 
largely through his conciliatory spirit and his 
wise counsel that in a year or two the division 
was healed and the two churches became one 
again. This happy result was hailed with de- 
light all over the state and £he credit was giv- 
en, as it was due, largely to Alexander Procter. 

He was then called to Howard County and 
served the church at Glasgow one-half his 
time, and devoted the rest to the country 
churches. It was at this time that he served 
the old church in Antioch, in which he grew 
up, and won the esteem and love which he ever 
afterward held. Many of the churches through- 
out Central Missouri enjoyed his labors at this 
time, and friendship was formed to be termin- 
ated only by death. Again and again through 
all the years of his active ministry was he 
called back to hold meetings for these churches, 
and in these meetings, in these humble country 
and village churches, many of his greatest ser- 
mons were preached for the first time. 

In the year 1852, at the instance of Thos. 
M. Allen, M. E. Lard and others, Alexander 
Campbell made a tour of the Missouri churches 
in the interest of the endowment of Bethany 
College. Alexander Procter and T. M. Allen 



A Memorial Address 381 

met him at Hannibal and accompanied him 
through the state, terminating their journey on 
the north side of the river at Savannah and re- 
turning by another route, visited the churches 
along the Missouri River on both sides, closing 
the campaign at St. Iyouis. Of course great 
crowds gathered to hear the most famous 
preacher of the century. Frequently when 
Mr. Campbell was worn with the fatigue of 
travel and preaching and almost constant con- 
versation when out of the pulpit, Bro. Procter 
filled his appointments, and always to the de- 
light of the disappointed audiences, a most dif- 
ficult task indeed! This fact is mentioned to 
show that he had already become a great 
preacher and was the trusted companion and 
co-laborer of one who was easily the first 
preacher of his day, if not the most distin- 
guished of the century. After this memorable 
and successful campaign Bro. Procter's reputa- 
tion was established as the greatest preacher 
of his age in the state. The few churches 
throughout the country then able to enjoy the 
luxury of preaching every Lord's day sought 
his services, but he was compelled by what he 
regarded his duty to decline many tempting 
offers in order to devote his time and talents to 
his beloved Missouri. It was also partly due, 
perhaps, to a sense of obligation growing out 
of the peculiar circumstances of his education. 



382 A Memorial Address 

At all events, no sort of proposition was ever 
sufficient to persuade him from Missouri and 
lie never had a pastorate outside the state. 

After the untimely death of the lamented S. 
S. Church he was called to the church then 
worshiping in the new and for that day hand- 
some and commodious church building at Fifth 
and Franklin Ave. This pastorate developed his 
power as a preacher in many ways. It gave him 
access to the finest library then in Missouri, the 
Mercantile Library. Hitherto he had read the 
few books and magazines which his brethren had 
published and such books as his slender purse 
enabled him to purchase. He came, therefore, 
into a new domain of thought in literature, art, 
science and religion. He read enormously, and 
with such a mind and memory as he possessed, 
he acquired much of the very best thought of 
the centuries. The character of his reading at 
this time was the beginning of that breadth 
and liberality characteristic of all his preaching 
in after years. He was also thrown into more 
or less intimate contact with the able, scholar- 
ly and accomplished ministers of the denomi- 
nations then in that city, and while he despised 
all affectation and mere conventionalities, this 
association affected most favorably his habits 
and style as a thinker and preacher. It was in 
the early part of his St. Louis pastorate that he 
encountered the plumed knight of Presbyteri- 



A Memorial Address 383 

anism — Dr. N. L. Rice. One of the young 
men of Bro. Procter's church made application 
for membership in the Y. M. C. A. His right 
to become a member was challenged on the 
ground that he did not belong to an evangelical 
or orthodox church. Dr. Rice was chosen 
champion of the association. Bro. Procter ap- 
peared for his young friend. When the smoke 
of the battle had cleared away the young man 
was elected to membership, Dr. Rice was dis- 
comfited, and from that day forward there has 
been no difficulty on the score of our orthodoxy 
in the city of St. Louis or in the great state of 
Missouri. 

Next to the grace of God nothing has more 
to do in shaping the destiny of the young 
preacher than the books he reads and the com- 
pany he keeps. The average young man will 
learn more rapidly from the man from whom he 
differs than from him with whom he is agreed. 
Mr. Procter was not slow to acknowledge his 
indebtedness to the great men after whom he 
had read and those whom he had personally 
known who were not at all in sympathy with 
the special religious plea to which he devoted 
his life. His stay in St. Louis was a sort of 
post-graduate course to which he often referred 
with very great pleasure. Many of the strong- 
est ties of friendship he ever formed were 
wrought in this interesting field. 



384 A Memorial Address 

It must -not be thought for a moment that 
during these busy, studious years there was no 
relaxation. He was ever full of sentiment and 
was by no means a stranger to the tender pas- 
sion that comes to the great and small, the 
king and peasant alike. He worshiped at 
more shrines than one, and sang love songs 
and wrote poetry like other mortals. He was 
not without a sense of the needs of a great lov- 
ing heart like his own. Mother, home and 
love, were words that moved him to eloquence 
and tenderest expression. And yet he seemed 
to be in no haste to wed. Many a young min- 
ister has handicapped himself for life, and has 
done irreparable injury to some simple-hearted, 
trusting girl by a hasty or too early marriage. 
In a sphere less conspicuous, where social de- 
mands are less rigorous, she would have been 
satisfied and satisfying, but as a minister's 
wife her life is one continued sacrifice if not 
failure. 

It was in the fall of 1857, when in his thirty- 
third year, Bro. Procter was married to Mrs. 
Caroline M. Prewitt, nee Shaw, of St. Francis 
County. Just the woman which this sen- 
timental, spirituelle dreamer needed to bring 
him back now and then from the blue skies 
and the shining stars in the midst of which he 
so delighted to revel and dream — and to 
acquaint him with the practical side of life. 



A Memorial Address 385 

After his marriage he wanted a home. Of 
course he did. Who that has a heart within 
him does not? For when a man has home and 
wife and children he has become part and par- 
cel of society, and has given security for his 
good behavior. He wanted a home in the coun- 
try; his health demanded it. He wanted a home 
in the country where broad acres and green 
grasses and lofty trees would surround him and 
overshadow him. He loved the green grasses, 
the flowers and shrubs and trees. He loved 
the birds with their tuneful notes, the graceful 
squirrel, the lowing cattle and the grateful, 
fawning dog. He loved the hearty greetings 
and the simple unaffected manners of the coun- 
try folk. These he could not have in the 
crowded city. Except when with his books 01 
in his pulpit, he was always lonely in the city. 
In the country with the boundless blue heavens 
above him, and the shining stars overhead; 
with the ten thousand musical sounds ever in 
the air, even the sound of the "Katydid" and 
the chirp of the cricket, and God over all and 
in all, he was never lonely. He was indeed 
ever in royal company. I do not therefore 
know whether it was more the delightful men 
and women who have always made Independ- 
ence so delightful, or the blue skies, the golden 
sunsets — for in no land, not even in far-famed 
Italy, is either to be surpassed, — or in the lofty 
25 



386 A Memorial Address 

trees, monarchs of the forests, or the sweet- 
smelling meadows, or the fragrant flowers, 
which determined the location of his home, 
but certain it is, for good and sufficient rea- 
sons he made Independence his home, from 
which the flattery nor blandishments of his 
admirers, nor the gold of the covetous city, 
could ever allure him. Here in the tenderest 
companionship and comradeship he lived with 
his excellent wife. Here his children were 
born; here they were trained to womanhood 
and manhood, and never was there a more 
faithful and indulgent father, and never more 
devoted children. They were all spared to 
him, Mary and Stella and Emma and Roland, 
with their devoted mother. Here he dispensed 
that abundant hospitality which was the joy of 
his friends, and never - forgotten by the thou- 
sands of his brethren and other pilgrims who 
paused for a grasp of the hand of this great 
preacher. 

Here he tended his flock through nearly half 
a century. He led them even beside the still 
waters and caused them to lie down in green 
pastures. No church was ever more perfectly 
satisfied with its pastor, and no pastor ever 
more devoted to his flock. Whether lawyers, 
physicians, merchants, farmers or day-laborers, 
they were proud of him. Whether they fol- 
lowed him always or not, for sometimes, like 



A Memorial Address 387 

the eagle, lie soared into heights which they 
could not reach or descended into depths which 
they could not fathom, still they trusted him 
and had no doubt he was right if they could 
only understand him. The young men sat at 
his feet as did the devout young Hebrews 
at the feet of Gamaliel. The women loved 
him as father or elder brother, because in that 
serene face and in those splendid blue eyes 
naught of unbridled passion was ever seen. 
They trusted him, too. At the bridal altar, no 
one was more desired, and at thousands of 
funerals he came as a ministering angel. He 
was honored by all classes. "None knew him 
but to love him, none named him but to 
praise.'" Nor were his labors and benedic- 
tions confined to his home church. By a gen- 
erous arrangement, always understood between 
him and his home church, he was free to go as 
he pleased, and therefore nearly every church 
of any prominence in the state, at one time or 
another, enjoyed his services. In the earlier 
and middle part of his ministry he was in great 
demand in the protracted meetings of his 
brethren, and while not an evangelist in the 
modern sense of the word, under his labors 
a great multitude became obedient to the faith. 
The sermons preached in these meetings were 
never forgotten by those who heard him. 
While he never had a pastorate outside of the 



388 A Memorial Address 

state, his labors often extended to other states, 
so that his reputation as a great preacher 
extends to all lands where the plea of the Dis- 
ciples is known. It was at these great meet- 
ings at home and in other States that he made 
his reputation as one of the great preachers and 
thinkers of the century. 

He not only labored successfully in the gos- 
pel at home and abroad, but he contributed 
largely to the efforts of the brethren towards 
organization. It was often said that no state 
meeting or state convention of his brethren was 
complete without his presence. The minutes 
of such meetings would show that he attended 
more of these meetings than any minister in 
the state and was always a prominent figure not 
only in their business deliberations, but also in 
the pulpit ministrations. It mattered not who 
was on the program, it was always understood 
that he would be heard in at least one sermon 
during the convention. Conscious that he was 
among his brethren who loved him, it was here 
that he rose to his greatest heights. It is 
much to be regretted that but few of these 
great sermons have been preserved to his breth- 
ren. He did not write sermons. The me- 
chanical execution was laborious to him and he 
never learned to manipulate manuscript. 

It was conceded that for a number of years 
Missouri stood at the very front in the matter 



A Memorial Address 389 

of organization for state evangelization. This 
fact was due as much to Alexander Procter as 
to any other man in the state, not because he 
was himself an organizer, but because he gave 
the weight of his immense influence in the 
state to every effort to give greater efficiency to 
our co-operative efforts. He was the fast friend 
of the old mass meetings, called "State Meet- 
ings," in which many efforts were made for the 
systematic evangelization of the state, and under 
the labors of such men as Allen Wright and Dr. 
W. H. Hopson, employed by the old State Meet- 
ings, many of the strongholds now occupied 
were captured, after mighty battles had been 
fought by these fearless and faithful men. 

During the dark days of the Civil War he was 
compelled for personal safety to leave his home, 
but while many of his brethren found refuge in 
other states he clung to his beloved state, and 
wherever it was peaceful or possible was his 
voice heard pleading with his brethren to hold 
fast their confidence and assuring them that 
the storm would soon pass by. When the 
war closed he was first among his brethren to 
gather up the scattered forces, and reorganized 
the old State Meeting for council and co-opera- 
tion. 

As early as 1868, at Columbia, he and T. M. 
Allen and others, touched by the cry of orphan- 
age which came up from the desolated homes 



390 A Memorial Address 

on every hand, organized to establish the or- 
phan school for girls at Camden Point. To 
this work he gave his thought, his prayers, his 
time, and to the day of his death it was a pro- 
found grief that this enterprise did not meet his 
expectations. He was the friend of education 
and hence the friend of all our schools and col- 
leges and was himself connected at different 
times with the educational enterprises at Inde- 
pendence. 

About this time, feeling the need of a better 
means of communication among the churches, 
and a better advocate of the plea for which he 
stood, he united with several of his brethren in 
an effort to establish a weekly paper to be 
edited and published at Kansas City, Mo. The 
prospectus was written under the shade trees in 
the yard of G. W. Longan, in Warrensburg. 
Bro. Procter, G. W. Longan, A. B. Jones, H. 
H. Haley and the writer were present. It was, 
in some respects, a remarkable paper. While 
it sought to be loyal to the great principles of 
the Reformation of the 19th century it was a 
sort of emancipation proclamation from the 
bondage of the traditions which, like barnacles, 
had fastened themselves on the new movement 
to restore New Testament Christianity. It was 
called The Christian, and launched at Kansas 
City in the latter part of the year 1869 or first 
part of '70 with Alex. Procter as one of the edi- 



A Memorial Address 391 

tors. G. W. Iyongan, was office editor, and 
moved to Kansas City that tie might give it his 
personal attention. In the early issues of this 
new journal may be found many articles from 
the pen of Bro. Procter, and these constitute the 
chief part of the writings preserved from his 
pen. L,ack of business ability in the manage- 
ment was soon developed, and the paper was 
consolidated with the Gospel Echo, then pub- 
lished by J. H. Garrison at Quincy, 111., and 
was afterwards removed to St. L,ouis, where it 
was published as The Christian by the Christian 
Publishing Co. until The Evangelist, of Chi- 
cago, formerly of Iowa, was united with it; since 
which time it has been known as The Christian- 
Evangelist, than which for more than a quarter 
of a century there has been no more popular or 
influential religious journal among our people. 
When the Iyouisville Plan of Co-operation 
was adopted, which was practically the plan 
under which we are now working, Bro. Procter 
gave it his hearty approval and support until it 
was modified by our present constitution. In 
this change of plan his advice and counsel were 
considered. For many years, perhaps since the 
adoption of our present constitution and plan of 
work, he has been a member of the State 
Board, and held the position at the time of his 
death. Never was there a more faithful serv- 
ant of his brethren. Through heat of summer 



392 A Memorial Address 

and blasts of winter lie was in regular attend- 
ance upon the meetings of the Board, and when 
remonstrated with for unnecessary exposure he 
would say, "I feared you would not have a 
quorum." For these valuable services through 
all these years he never had so much as postage 
stamps by way of remuneration. 

Perhaps in this memorial sermon it will be 
expected that something should be said of his 
theology, so far as it was peculiar; and it is 
generally understood that on some questions he 
was not in accord with his brethren. Some- 
times, and especially by some men, he was 
severely criticized. It is an exceedingly diffi- 
cult task to state accurately another man's 
faith, since "no man knoweth the things of a 
man save the spirit of a man that is in him." 
One thing, however, may be safely said, that 
doctrine is valuable or hurtful only as it stands 
related to the development of character. 
Whatever doctrine tends to make men little, 
narrow, selfish and mean, is to be condemned 
as of the evil one. Whatever aoctrine tends to 
make a great, broad, unselfish and good man, 
is not to be condemned, though it may not be 
generally accepted. Judged by this standard, 
the peculiar views of Alexander Procter are 
not to be condemned, and especially by men 
who perhaps never had the capacity to under- 
stand him, and who certainly never approxi- 



A Memorial Address 393 

mated him in the sublimity of his character. 

" For modes of faith let zealous bigots fight, 
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right." 

In the earlier years of his ministry he ac- 
cepted the views generally held by his brethren 
without question, and was what would in that 
day have been denominated a very "Campbell- 
ite." No man preached more faithfully the 
conditions of pardon, as laid down in the com- 
mission given by our Lord to his apostles, and 
no man among us discussed with more force 
and clearness than he the differences between 
the denominations and the Disciples. In after 
years he came to preach more and more "Christ 
and Him crucified," believing, as he often said, 
that when a man gets right about Christ, he 
will get right about everything else. And 
while he did not use the stock phrases of the 
day, such as "very God and very man," 
"God the Son" and the "Triune God," no 
man, living or dead, in his preaching, ever ex- 
alted Christ more as Immanuel — God with us 
— than did he. He was an evolutionist, not of 
the sort that puts God out of the universe, 
maintaining that there existed originally noth- 
ing but matter and force, and that force, blind, 
unintelligent and undirected, acting on matter, 
produced and is producing whatever is mate- 
rial, intellectual, moral and spiritual in the 



394 A Memorial Address 

whole universe; but a theistic or Christian evo- 
lutionist, who believed and taught that what 
the atheistic evolutionist called force was our 
God, and that God was before and in every 
creative act; and that all things were made by 
him, and that without him was not anything 
made that was made. Evolution was to him 
God's method of making a universe, physical, 
moral and spiritual. Hence he was the pro- 
foundest believer in the immanence of God in 
all things, and was often heard to say, "If 
there is a place in the universe as large as my 
hand where God is not, then is he not infinite.' y 
He held that every star in the heavens above 
us, every planet in space, every species of every 
living thing from the smallest form of vege- 
table life up to man, was brought into being by 
a separate creative act of God, and hence he 
saw God in all things. He heard him thunder- 
ing in the cloud, murmuring in the tempest 
and whispering in the breeze. When asked by 
a fanatical self-constituted evangelist if he 
expected "to go to heaven when he died," he 
said he did not expect to go anywhere; that 
he was already in heaven: as he sat under the 
shade of the great spreading branches of the 
great trees in his lawn. "Where God is, there 
is heaven," said he, "and he is here. He talks 
to me every day, and I talk to him, and when I 
die I shall only be 'forever with the L,ord.' " 



A Memorial Address 395 

No man repeated with more earnestness the 
Psalmist's words, "Whither shall I flee from 
thy presence?" etc. 

He was in sympathy with the higher critics. 
Not that he accepted all the alleged results of 
the higher criticism, but he believed in their 
methods of studying the Holy Scriptures, and 
stolidly maintained that their methods were the 
methods of Alexander Campbell, who so often 
proclaimed that in order to understand the sa- 
cred writings, the student must ascertain, who 
was the writer, to whom did he write, what 
was the environment of the writer and those to 
whom he wrote, what was the purpose of the 
writing. In other words, that every passage in 
Holy Scripture is to be understood only in the 
light of its historical setting. He, and others 
who held this view with him, strongly averred 
that the results of higher criticism would make 
our Bible more intelligible and make possible a 
more intelligent faith in the fact that holy men 
of old spoke as they were moved by the Holy 
Spirit. 

He rejected the theory of verbal and plenary 
inspiration; that is, he did hot believe that in- 
spiration of the sacred writers guaranteed in- 
fallibility. Nor did he believe that their 
inspiration made them simply amanuenses, 
writing what the Holy Spirit dictated. He 
rather believed that inspiration was such a 



396 A Memorial Address 

mental and spiritual excitation and exaltation 
that the inspired man saw and wrote what he 
could not have seen or written without such 
excitation and exaltation. Nor did he believe, 
I think, that even such inspiration made them 
infallible or their writings inerrant. And yet, 
whether logically consistent or not, he held the 
Holy Bible to be the word of God, and held 
with his Protestant brethren that the Bible, and 
especially the New Testament, is an all-suffi- 
cient rule of faith and practice. And that "all 
Scripture given by inspiration is profitable for 
doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruc- 
tion in righteousness, that the man of God may 
be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto every 
good work." 

He held that the garden of Eden and the ac- 
count of the Adamic transgression was an alle- 
gorical presentation of the introduction of moral 
evil into the world, but the fact of sin and the 
direful consequences in the life that now is, as 
well as the life to come, he held with a tenacity 
and taught with a force and an eloquence which 
no man who heard him will ever forget. While 
he repudiated ex animo the doctrine of so much 
suffering inflicted as penalty for sin, he thun- 
dered into the sinner's ear and burned it into his 
very heart, "The soul that sinneth it shall die." 
He did not for many years believe in a personal 
devil, and taught that a man is "tempted 



A Memorial Address 397 

when he is drawn away of his own Inst and en- 
ticed," and insisted that "Inst when it is con- 
ceived brought forth the sin and the sin, when 
it is finished bringeth forth death. ' ' He said: If 
this is a personal devil, then is he infinite, since 
he is omnipresent. Omnipresence is an attri- 
bute of God only, and cannot belong to any of 
his creatures. The principle of moral evil in 
the universe is therefore called the evil one, 
which is the devil. He did not, I think, hold 
any theory of the atonement, and did not there- 
fore preach Christ's death as an atonement for 
sin; but he preached Christ as the Savior of 
sinners, emphasizing the annunciation of the 
angel to Mary "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, 
Savior, for he shall save his people from their 
sins." He taught that under every dispensa- 
tion the sinner was saved from his sins only 
when he repented and because he repented, 
and not because of faith in any theology or 
any governmental provision. As an enabling 
act Christ revealed the wonderful love and 
goodness of God, and the goodness of God 
"leadeth to repentance." Ordinances were 
therefore of value chiefly because they exhibited 
the presence of that faith in the soul that 
brings the physical conditions that enable God 
to be Just and the Justifier of him that be- 
lieves. He did believe that Christ was the 
Daysman through whom was brought the 



398 A Memorial Address 

atonement. He did not often preach on escha- 
tology and said but little of the life to come. 
He taught and felt that a man saved from sin 
by the power of the life of Jesus Christ was safe 
in all worlds in time and in eternity. 

It would not be true to him not to say that 
for many years he inclined towards what is 
called the "larger hope" and yearned to be- 
lieve that the day will come when God shall be 
"all in all" and every knee shall bow and every 
tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory 
of God. He said: If truth is infinite and false- 
hood finite the time will come when truth will 
triumph over falsehood, and if right is infinite 
and wrong is finite, then there will come a time 
when right will triumph over wrong, and when 
truth and righteousness prevail then shall the 
kingdom be delivered up to the Father and God 
shall be all in all. It will be asked, what, then, 
did he do with this passage or with that? To 
this he would answer: I believe nothing be- 
cause it is in a book, if it stultifies my reason. 
I believe nothing is true because it is in a book, 
but it is in the book because it is true. Others 
might not be able to do this, but accepting as 
substantially true what I have said of his views 
of inspiration and infallibility it is not difficult 
to see the lines on which his peculiar theology 
was based. 

Perhaps I have said all, and more than needs 



A Memorial Address 399 

to be said, 011 his peculiar view which seemed 
in later years to put him apart from his breth- 
ren. No attempt has been made to vindicate 
him or to defend any view he held or taught. 
His great, loving heart and his Christ-like life 
must forever be his vindication. It has often 
been said by way of condemnation that he was 
a rationalist. Perhaps so, but if so, in the lan- 
guage of one capable of an impartial estimate, 
he was a Christian rationalist. But I am anx- 
ious that the whole truth, as nearly as it may 
be, shall be known of my friend and brother 
and kinsman, and claim this at your hands. 
Be not alarmed by words. Even great ration- 
alists have been able to live great Christian 
lives and die triumphant a Christian death. A 
recent writer says: "What is rationalism? The 
bugbear of the churches. Only a bugbear so 
far as the churches are alarmed. Rationalism 
is Reasoningism." No deeper insult can be 
put upon the Bible than to say it cannot stand 
"reasoning." I may be less than the least of 
the orthodox, but all there is of me is ortho- 
dox. I may have been endowed by heaven 
with but a feeble spark of reason, but all that 
heaven has given me of reason I will use upon 
theology, therefore I am always and wholly 
a rationalist. To say that rationalism is fatal 
to evangelical religion is to say that evangel- 
ical religion can exist only among idiots. 



400 A Memorial Address 

Was Canon Kingsley an idiot? He was as- 
suredly a rationalist. Hear what the most 
straitest sect of New England Puritanism in 
old Andover and Princeton says of him: 
( 'Kingsley 's theology was never coherent, con- 
sistent or orthodox. He was a leader of the 
Broad Church, but he was a strong upholder 
of the Athanasian Creed; and was reverent, 
though somewhat free in his treatment of the 
Scriptures. . . . But few will be found who 
were such a tremendous force for good. He 
had much of the prophet in his make-up and 
commission." Dean Stanley says in his funeral 
sermon: "His life and conversation, as he 
walked among ordinary men, were often as of 
a waker among drowsy sleepers. And there 
has been no more pure and perfect knight, 
none more dedicated to what seemed to him 
the right, who wore his heart on his sleeve and 
his sword at the service of the weak, than he 
who lies restfully amid the grass, the wild 
flowers and the tall fir trees of the secluded 
parish church, where he loved so much and 
made so many love him." 

Was Bunsen an idiot? Hear what the same 
high conservative authority says of him: "We 
can not and care not to recapitulate Bunsen' s 
sad lapses into rationalism in this and other 
works, such as his abandonment of prophecy, 
and even his denial of the resurrection of Jesus. 



A Memorial Address 401 

And yet, strange to say, he not only opposed 
intensely the rationalism of Baner, Feuerbach 
and the Tubingen school — not to speak of 
Strauss — but he lived in the Scriptures and 
clung to them as the object of supremest love 
and only source of spiritual life. The fact is 
that Bunsen was an enigma, or perhaps we 
might say a theological Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
Hyde, with a rationalistic head and an evan- 
gelical heart, and yet no one has questioned 
the reality and depth of his piety." Dr. 
McCash says: "I am able to say, what I be- 
lieve I can say of no other with whom I had 
so much intercourse, that we never conversed 
during those five days for ten minutes at a time 
without his returning, however far he might 
be off, to his Bible and his Savior as the object 
which was the dearest to him." 

Bunsen's was one of the notable deaths of 
Christian history, not only for the beauty of 
human love, but pre-eminently for a triumphant 
and unwavering faith and a rapturous love of 
Christ, which would have crowned the life of 
any saint that ever lived. To sum up his 
heart orthodoxy, let me add one of his latest 
sayings in a letter: "The L,ord taught me 
early that I am a sinner, and that only in 
Christ I can become well pleasing to God and 
a child of God. Few souls have lived so 

brightly and serenely, so far above the meanness 
26 



4-02 A Memorial Address 

of selfish aims and petty jealousies, and so long 
as faith, hope and love take their place among 
the things that can not be shaken, his immor- 
tality is assured." 

Of the great Neander, who was an avowed 
rationalist, it is said: "On his last birthday 
he spoke in a voice trembling with emotion, 
calling himself 'only a poor sinner,' and ex- 
claiming with Saint Augustine, 'O Divine 
Love, I have not loved thee strongly, deeply, 
warmly enough.' " Dr. Schaff, one of his 
pupils, says of him, "To understand and ad- 
mire in its true living force that great word of 
the Redeemer, 'Except ye become as little chil- 
dren ye shall not enter into the kingdom of 
heaven,' it was only necessary to become ac- 
quainted with Neander." Bishop Huntington 
says of him: "He died as he had lived. His 
last words to his beloved sister who had 
watched over his lonely life so long, were, 
'Sister, I am weary; let us go home;' and im- 
mediately with tenderness and affection he said 
to his kind attendant, 'Good-night,' and fell 
gently asleep and awoke to look face to face 
upon the Christ who led him out of dark- 
ness into the light, where we need no glass 
and are conscious of no dimness." Of Prof. 
Delitzsch, Dr. Curtiss, Professor of Hebrew in 
Chicago Theological Seminary, who was his 
pupil, said: "Thus a prince and a father in 



A Memorial Address 403 

'Israel has left us, and we must wait long before 
we see any one worthy to take his place." 

If Alexander Procter was a rationalist, he 
was such an one as these, and surely was not in 
bad company, since such rationalism was not 
destructive of a beautiful trust in God, and did 
not hinder the attainment of great piety and 
high Christian achievement in them or in 
him. 

But our comrade has fallen under the do- 
minion of death. For months he anticipated 
his coming, and talked freely with his friends 
of his approach. He was able to be out of bed 
and to sit under the shade of the trees to the 
end. He preached his last sermon on his last 
birthday, the first day of last April. L,oving 
hands had made the church-house he loved so 
well a bower of sweet spring flowers. His 
friends were there in great numbers. With the 
delight of a child he greeted them, and with 
the love of the Great Apostle of I^ove, he gave 
them his benediction. Quietly and daily he 
waited the coming of the messenger, and was 
ready when he came. He fell asleep in Jesus 
without a shudder, and to-day, as we fondly 
believe, he is with the sainted dead and with 
his risen L,ord whom he loved and served so. 
well. 

Few of his fellow-laborers and comrades sur- 
vive him. They watch and wait in the conn- 



404 A Memorial Address 

dent expectation that amid the greetings on the 
other side, his will be among the first. Fare- 
well, dear brother, farewell! Comrade in 
many a hard-fought battle, farewell. Pale, 
patient sufferer, thy warfare is ended and thou 
hast the crown of many stars. Farewell! 



Oct e i&OX 



SEP 20 1901 



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